Jeffrey K. Staton

Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach

InthewakeoftheColdWar,democracyhasgainedthestatusofamantra.Yetthereisnoconsensusabouthowtoconceptualizeand measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argueforanewapproachtoconceptualizationandmeasurement.Wefirstreviewsomeoftheweaknessesamongtraditionalapproaches. Wethenlayoutourapproach,whichmaybecharacterizedas historical, multidimensional, disaggregated,and transparent.Weendby reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.

Judicial Power in Domestic and International Politics

Although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide political science into subfields, rigid boundaries remain in some contexts. In this essay, we suggest that the assumption that international politics is characterized by anarchy whereas domestic politics is characterized by hierarchy continues to divide research on the conditions under which governments are constrained by courts, international or domestic. We contend that we will learn more about the process by which courts constrain governments, and do so more quickly, if we relax the assumption and recognize the substantial similarities between domestic and international research on this topic. We review four recent books that highlight contemporary theories of the extent to which domestic and international law binds states, and discuss whether a rigid boundary between international and domestic scholarship can be sustained on either theoretical or empirical grounds.

Judicial Policy Implementation in Mexico City and Merida

Why do some of the worlds constitutional courts challenge governmental authority over many kinds of policies, while others avoid conflict over particularly sensitive or salient political issues? Why do some elected officials immediately obey judicial resolutions that challenge their authority, while others find ways not to implement judicial decisions? These questions are important in understanding the role constitutional courts play in ensuring that elected officials respect a states fundamental political rules.1 If constitutional courts are unwilling to challenge governmental authority, or if public officials are unwilling to implement politically unfavorable decisions, the degree to which constitutional courts can serve as effective horizontal mechanisms of accountability will be considerably constrained. Despite the importance of both questions, much of the growing comparative scholarship on law and courts has sought to explain judicial behavior without addressing the reactions of government officials to adverse judicial decisions.2 Consequently, scholars are left with a largely one-sided account of judicial politics that provides much empirical support for theories of judicial decision making but little support for theoretical conclusions about the implementation of judicial policy. In contrast to this trend, recent work by Georg Vanberg integrates diverse studies of judicial activism and policy implementation by specifying what might be called a public enforcement mechanism for judicial orders, in which public support for courts and the related pressure constituents can place on their representatives may induce compliance with adverse judicial resolutions.3 On this account, public support also can provide the political cover courts require to take on sensitive political conflicts. Of course, this mechanism works only if people are sufficiently informed about the nature of the conflicts they are purported to enforce. Accordingly, Vanberg considers how the relative transparency ofjudicialized conflicts influences interbranch conflict.4 Despite Vanbergs important theoretical advance in simplifying diverse yet connected studies, his model leaves a number of issues underdeveloped. This article addresses two. First, public willingness to help enforce judicial resolutions and public capacity to impose significant costs on their representatives for instances of noncompliance are distinct concepts. They should be treated as such in both theoretical and empirical analysis. Second, if the kind of information concerning interbranch conflict to which people have

State Delegate Selection Rules for Presidential Nominations, 1972–2000

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the consequences of delegate selection rules for presidential nominations, yet few have sought an explanation for the variance in these rules across the states and over time. In this article, we ask why state party elites would open their processes of delegate selection to a large and potentially ideologically diverse constituency by holding primary elections rather than caucuses. We develop an account of endogenous institutional choice that suggests elites ought to be increasingly likely to open their delegate selection rules as the ideological nature of the party and the states electorate converge. We test this claim using a new data set on Democratic Party selection rules between 1972 and 2000 and find that the degree of ideological convergence is a strong predictor of state party choices to open the process of delegate selection. These results provide additional support for general theoretical claims that characterize political institutions as fundamentally endogenous to the politics they regulate.

Substitutable Protections: Credible Commitment Devices and Socioeconomic Insulation

Scholars have argued that credible commitment institutions have important impacts on political outcomes as diverse as economic growth and social order. If commitment institutions function as theorized, then their effects should vary across individuals, groups, or states, based on their respective vulnerability to promise breaking. Yet existing empirical studies never pursue this implication. The failure to do so risks a number of inferential errors and can lead to suboptimal policy prescriptions for institutional reform. In this article, the authors develop and provide empirical evidence for these claims within the context of a commitment problem that scholars believe undermines social order.

V-Dem Codebook V6

All variables that V-Dem is compiling are included in the Codebook.

Legal Institutions and Democratic Survival

Do institutions designed to limit arbitrary government promote the survival of democratic regimes? Although the international effort to build the rule of law is predicated on a belief that they do, mainstream research on democratic survival typically treats institutions as epiphenomenal. We argue that institutions encourage regime survival by addressing problems of monitoring and social coordination that complicate democratic compromise. We find that property-rights institutions generally, and judicial institutions specifically, encourage survival, especially when macroeconomic conditions favor inter-class compromise.

Towards Tracking Political Sentiment through Microblog Data

People express and amplify political opinions in Microblogs such as Twitter, especially when major political decisions are made. Twitter provides a useful vehicle for capturing and tracking popular opinion on burning issues of the day. In this paper, we focus on tracking the changes in political sentiment related to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and its decisions, focusing on the key dimensions on support, emotional intensity, and polarity. Measuring changes in these sentiment dimensions could be useful for social and political scientists, policy makers, and the public. This preliminary work adapts existing sentiment analysis techniques to these new dimensions and the specifics of the corpus (Twitter). We illustrate the promise of our work with an important case study of tracking sentiment change building up to, and immediately following one recent landmark Supreme Court decision. This example illustrates how our work could help answer fundamental research questions in political science about the nature of Supreme Court power and its capacity to influence public discourse. 1 Background and Motivation

Estimating the Effect of Leisure on Judicial Performance

Normative concerns often lead designers of political institutions to insulate judges from direct accountability and oversight that creates pressure on their decision making. However, such insulation undermines performance-relevant incentives and can give rise to shirking by judges. To understand the consequences of such shirking for the judicial process, we take advantage of an annual sporting event that creates differential distractions across judges. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that when a judge’s team is participating in the NCAA Mens’ Basketball Tournament, the judge decides cases more slowly during the time the Tournament takes place. We also show those opinions are cited more negatively by subsequent decisions. These findings suggest a lack of direct accountability for their work product that is often part of political independence has deleterious consequences for the material judicial product. The findings also have implications for possible institutional design solutions.

The Costa Rican Supreme Court’s Compliance Monitoring System

In the summer of 2009, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Costa Rica began monitoring compliance with its direct orders in amparo and habeas corpus cases. The court announced the early results from its analysis at a well-attended March 2010 press conference. The president of the court promised to continue monitoring and publicizing the results for the foreseeable future. We use a unique data set on compliance derived from this monitoring system to evaluate theoretical claims about the relationship between the transparency of judicial orders and compliance. We observe that vague orders, and orders issued without definite time frames for compliance, were associated with delayed implementation. We also find that orders issued after the press conference were implemented roughly two months earlier than orders issued just prior to the press conference.