James E. Monogan

The politics of immigrant policy in the 50 US states, 2005-2011

This article asks what shaped immigrant policy in the 50 states between 2005 and 2011. Theoretically, politicians are influenced by electoral considerations as they craft laws. Law-makers consider both current public opinion and how the electorate is likely to change, at least in the near future. Empirically, the article analyses an original dataset on immigrant-related laws enacted by the states with a Bayesian spatial conditionally autoregressive model. The analysis shows that state immigrant policy is affected primarily by legislative professionalism, electoral ideology, state wealth and change in the foreign-born population.

Research Preregistration in Political Science: The Case, Counterarguments, and a Response to Critiques

This article describes the current debate on the practice of preregistration in political science—that is, publicly releasing a research design before observing outcome data. The case in favor of preregistration maintains that it can restrain four potential causes of publication bias, clearly distinguish deductive and inductive studies, add transparency regarding a researcher’s motivation, and liberate researchers who may be pressured to find specific results. Concerns about preregistration maintain that it is less suitable for the study of historical data, could reduce data exploration, may not allow for contextual problems that emerge in field research, and may increase the difficulty of finding true positive results. This article makes the case that these concerns can be addressed in preregistered studies, and it offers advice to those who would like to pursue study registration in their own work.

Gone with the Wind: Federalism and the Strategic Placement of Air Polluters

In federal systems both state governments and firms have incentives to strategically locate polluting facilities where the environmental and health consequences will be borne as much as possible by residents of other jurisdictions. We analyze air polluter location in the United States using a spatial point pattern model, which models where events occur in latitude and longitude. Our analyses indicate that major air polluters are significantly more likely to be located near a state’s downwind border than a control group of other industrial facilities, results that are robust to a wide variety of model specifications and measurement strategies. This effect is particularly pronounced for facilities with toxic air emissions. The observed pattern of polluter location varies systematically across states and time in ways that suggest it is responsive to public policy at both the national and state levels.

Modeling Time-Series Count Data: The Unique Challenges Facing Political Communication Studies

This paper demonstrates the importance of proper model specification when analyzing time-series count data in political communication studies. It is common for scholars of media and politics to investigate counts of coverage of an issue as it evolves over time. Many scholars rightly consider the issues of time dependence and dynamic causality to be the most important when crafting a model. However, to ignore the count features of the outcome variable overlooks an important feature of the data. This is particularly the case when modeling data with a low number of counts. In this paper, we argue that the Poisson autoregressive model (Brandt and Williams, 2001) accurately meets the needs of many media studies. We replicate the analyses of Flemming et al. (1997), Peake and Eshbaugh-Soha (2008), and Ura (2009) and demonstrate that models missing some of the assumptions of the Poisson autoregressive model often yield invalid inferences. We also demonstrate that the effect of any of these models can be illustrated dynamically with estimates of uncertainty through a simulation procedure. The paper concludes with implications of these findings for the practical researcher.

Strategic party placement with a dynamic electorate

This article expands upon formal research on elections by considering competition in a dynamic environment of multiple elections. The key assumptions are that the ideology of the electorate is changing in a known way, parties cannot change their position from one election to the next, and one party has a non-ideological advantage in the first election. A deterministic version of this game shows that with a large valence advantage for one party, both parties will converge to the median for a future election. With a small valence advantage, there is no pure-strategy equilibrium, so a stochastic version of the game is considered. With probabilistic voting, parties place themselves closer to the present median, but move towards the future median the more highly they value winning in the future and the less uncertain they are about election outcomes.

Immigration Politics and Partisan Realignment: California, Texas, and the 1994 Election

This article demonstrates how the party identification of various demographic groups in California and Texas changed in response to the gubernatorial campaigns of Pete Wilson and George W. Bush. Using aggregated time series of Field Poll, Texas Poll, and Gallup data, difference-in-differences results show that Wilson’s embrace of Proposition 187 was followed by significant Hispanic movement toward the Democratic Party in California. Time series analysis substantiates that this action led to a long-term 7.1 percentage point Democratic shift among California’s Hispanics. This suggests that state-level actors can influence partisan coalitions in their state, beyond what would be expected from national-level factors.

Confirmation Wars, Legislative Time, and Collateral Damage: The Impact of Supreme Court Nominations on Presidential Success in the U.S. Senate

Presidents often see a Supreme Court nomination as an opportunity to leave a lasting mark on policy. Recent studies speculate that focusing on Supreme Court nominees affects presidential success beyond the confirmation process, but this has not been established systematically. We develop and test a hypothesis stating that presidents who get into a battle to promote a controversial Supreme Court nominee will see delays and failures in their efforts to promote their legislative agenda in the Senate and fill lower level judicial vacancies. We test our theory using data on presidential policy agenda items from 1967 to 2010 and lower level judicial nominations from 1977 to 2010. We find that increased efforts in promoting confirmation reduce the likelihood of timely Senate approval of important policy proposals and nominees to federal district courts.

Analysing Drivers of Low Carbon Transitions in Post-Fukushima Japan: A Cross-City Comparison of Electricity Consumption

Abstract The 11 March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster will forever be remembered as a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy. The changes to Japans energy system following Fukushima may nonetheless leave future generations with a more sustainable legacy. A growing body of literature hypothesizes that transitions like this one have the potential to reshape Japans energy system due to (1) an exogenous shock which (2) enables policy reforms that (3) gain momentum with the support of civil society organizations. However, this set of claims is based chiefly on small-n qualitative case studies at the national level in Europe. A significant opportunity exists to test the hypotheses on low carbon transitions across multiple cities in Asia. This article begins to fill that void with an econometric analysis of electricity use time-series data for 18 Japanese cities from 2007 to 2012. The results suggest that Japanese cities adopting post-Fukushima energy savings policy reforms experienced greater reductions in annual household electricity use than those not adopting reforms. At the same time, cities with higher concentrations of non-profit organizations (NPOs) saw greater reductions in annual household electricity use from the Fukushima disaster as well as post-shock policies. The research underscores the difficulties of testing transition theories and the need for qualitative research to complement inferences from quantitative studies on transitions.

Income inequality and the growth of redistributive spending in the United States (US) states: is there a link?

Prominent public policy models have hypothesised that rising income inequality will lead to more redistributive spending. Subsequent theoretical advancements and empirical research often failed to find a positive relationship between inequality and redistributive spending, however. Over the last few decades both income inequality and redistributive spending have been growing in the United States states. In this work, we consider whether temporal variation in inequality can explain variation in redistributive spending, while controlling for a number of factors that covary with redistributive spending in the states. In an analysis of data for 1976–2008, we find that higher levels of inequality are associated with greater redistributive spending, offering empirical evidence that fiscal policy at the state level responds to growing levels of income inequality. Considering the growing role of state governments in welfare provision during the past several decades, this finding is relevant for policy researchers and practitioners at all levels of government.

Patterns in the politics of drugs and tobacco: The Supreme Court and issue attention by policymakers and the press

Past research has demonstrated lasting effects of important Supreme Court decisions on issue attention in the national media. In this light, the Court has served as an important agenda setter. We significantly expand on these findings by arguing that these salient Court decisions can raise the perceived importance of political issues and induce heightened, short-term policy attention in the broader political system. Using measures of media attention, congressional policy actions, and presidential policy actions, we utilize dynamic vector autoregressive modelling to examine the Court’s impact on issue attention in the macro policy system regarding tobacco and drug policy. Overall, this study suggests that the Supreme Court’s most important decisions might significantly affect broader issue attention in the American political system.