Maya Sen

The Political Legacy of American Slavery

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South trace their origins to slaverys prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action policies, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. These results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of racial threat. To explain these results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of racial attitudes. We argue that, following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce racist norms and institutions. This produced racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations. Our results challenge the interpretation of a vast literature on racial attitudes in the American South.

Explaining Causal Findings without Bias: Detecting and Assessing Direct Effects

Researchers seeking to establish causal relationships frequently control for variables on the purported causal pathway, checking whether the original treatment effect then disappears. Unfortunately, this common approach may lead to biased estimates. In this article, we show that the bias can be avoided by focusing on a quantity of interest called the controlled direct effect. Under certain conditions, the controlled direct effect enables researchers to rule out competing explanations—an important objective for political scientists. To estimate the controlled direct effect without bias, we describe an easy-to-implement estimation strategy from the biostatistics literature. We extend this approach by deriving a consistent variance estimator and demonstrating how to conduct a sensitivity analysis. Two examples—one on ethnic fractionalization’s effect on civil war and one on the impact of historical plough use on contemporary female political participation—illustrate the framework and methodology.

The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities

The American system of higher education appears poised for disruptive change of potentially historic proportions due to massive new political, economic, and educational forces that threaten to undermine its business model, governmental support, and operating mission. These forces include dramatic new types of economic competition, difficulties in growing revenue streams as we had in the past, relative declines in philanthropic and government support, actual and likely future political attacks on universities, and some outdated methods of teaching and learning that have been unchanged for hundreds of years.

How Judicial Qualification Ratings May Disadvantage Minority and Female Candidates

This article uses two newly collected data sets to investigate the reliance by political actors on the external vetting of judicial candidates, in particular vetting conducted by the nation’s largest legal organization, the American Bar Association (ABA). Using these data, I show that minority and female nominees are more likely than whites and males to receive lower ratings, even after controlling for education, experience, and partisanship via matching. These discrepancies are important for two reasons. First, as I show, receiving poor ABA ratings is correlated with confirmation failure. Second, I demonstrate that ABA ratings do not actually predict whether judges will be “better” in terms of reversal rates. Taken together, these findings complicate the ABA’s influential role in judicial nominations, both in terms of setting up possible barriers against minority and female candidates and also in terms of its actual utility in predicting judicial performance.

How Social Science Research Can Improve Teaching

We marshal discoveries about human behavior and learning from social science research and show how they can be used to improve teaching and learning. The discoveries are easily stated as three social science generalizations: (1) social connections motivate, (2) teaching teaches the teacher, and (3) instant feedback improves learning. We show how to apply these generalizations via innovations in modern information technology inside, outside, and across university classrooms. We also give concrete examples of these ideas from innovations we have experimented with in our own teaching.

Technology Optimism or Pessimism about Genomic Science Variation among Experts and Scholarly Disciplines

Like lay people, experts vary in their technology optimism or pessimism about scientific endeavors, for reasons that are poorly understood. We explore experts’ technology optimism through a focus on genomics; its novelty, life-and-death implications, complex technology, and broad but as yet unknown societal implications make it an excellent subject for studying views about new knowledge. We use interviews with scientific and medical elites to show a wide range of views about genomics, and we analyze about 750 articles by prominent social scientists, law professors, and biologists to explore how values and norms reinforce or supersede experts’ shared scientific knowledge. We find that experts in some fields give genomics more attention than experts in others; that they differ in the aspects of genomics on which they focus; and that within a discipline or field, scholars differ in the extent to which they find genomics attractive or aversive. Overall, however, experts in more liberal or humanities-oriented disciplines tend to be less optimistic about genomics than scholars in relatively more conservative or scientifically oriented disciplines. We speculate on why genomics is an exception to the usual finding that liberals support science more than conservatives do.

The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Politicize the Judiciary

The American judiciary has increasingly come under attack as polarized and politicized. Using a newly collected dataset that captures the ideological positioning of nearly half a million judges and lawyers who have made campaign contributions, we present empirical evidence showing politicization through various tiers of the judicial hierarchy. We show that the higher the court, the more conservative and more polarized it becomes, in contrast with the broader population of attorneys, who tend to be liberal. These findings suggest that political actors not only appear to rely on ideology in the selection of judges, but that they strategically prioritize higher courts. To our knowledge, our study is the first to provide a direct ideological comparison across tiers of the judiciary and between judges and lawyers, and also the first to document how--and why--American courts are politicized.

A Symposium on "The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities"

The American system of higher education is under attack by political, economic, and educational forces that threaten to undermine its business model, governmental support, and operating mission. The potential changes are considerably more dramatic and disruptive than anything previously experienced. Traditional colleges and universities urgently need a coherent, thought-out response. Their central role in fostering the creation, preservation, and distribution of knowledge in the world may be at risk and, as a consequence, so too may be the spectacular progress across fields we have come to expect as a result. Although expertise from many disciplines is needed to address the problems in our institutions of higher education, political scientists may be especially well positioned to contribute to a solution. Many of the problems are essentially political, and our discipline includes those with the skills and knowledge necessary to understand and analyze the problems, to design strategies to ameliorate them, and to evaluate the consequences of any changes. We encourage political scientists to take up the challenge. In this light, we wrote “TheTroubled Future of Colleges and Universities” to offer a summary of the status quo, an analysis of the actual and likely economic and political attacks on the traditional system of higher education, a list of some largely inadequate responses that have been proposed or attempted, and some suggestions for more productive directions to go. We then recruited five distinguished political scientists familiarwiththeissuestocommentonourarticleorthegeneral issues we raised. Our commenters represent a “Who’s Who” among the nation’s leading political scientists who have also served in major leadership positions in university administration. As you will see, they have an enormous amount to contribute. Our contributors include current and former (and likely future!) university presidents, chairs, and deans. We start the symposium with Michael Laver, presently the dean for the Social Sciences at New York University. He explains that we don’t have to panic quite yet and shows that we can leverage some of the new, and possibly threatening, educational innovations—like online learning—to universities’ distinct advantage. Henry E. Brady, currently the dean at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, comes next. His essay draws nuanced parallels between the challenges faced by higher education today and the disruptive changes faced by newspapers, railroads, and other industries of years past. Next, Nannerl O. Keohane, now the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, identifies five important threats to the university business model, while also reminding us of the components of traditional universities that are essential to protect. The next commentary is by Virginia Sapiro, the dean of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, who brings a historical perspective to the symposium. Her essay puts our current difficulties in the context of 70 years of recurring disruptions, and she reminds us that higher education has weathered strong challenges in the past, too. The symposium concludes with an essay by John Mark Hansen, now the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor, and senior advisor to the President, at the University of Chicago. He brings a big picture perspective by focusing on the point of the university, the central role of academic freedom, and the delicate relationships with the various forces at work affecting higher education. Taken together, our commentators address a complicated set of challenges faced by higher education today. They raise new and unexpected problems, while also suggesting real and creative paths forward. The existing and coming disruptive changes in higher education require the immediate attention of our academic community. Each of our commenters provides compelling insights into the challenges facing universities, and all make important arguments and proposals deserving of much discussion and analysis. We hope other political scientists will follow up so that we may collectively begin to tackle these issues, important to so many in and beyond our discipline, departments, and universities. ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Does Encouragement Matter in Improving Gender Imbalances in Technical Fields? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Does encouragement help address gender imbalances in technical fields? We present the results of one of the first and largest randomized controlled trials on the topic. Using an applied statistics conference in the social sciences as our context, we randomly assigned half of a pool of 3,945 graduate students to receive two personalized emails encouraging them to apply (n = 1,976) and the other half to receive nothing (n = 1,969). We find a robust, positive effect associated with this simple intervention and suggestive evidence that women responded more strongly than men. However, we find that women’s conference acceptance rates are higher within the control group than in the treated group. This is not the case for men. The reason appears to be that female applicants in the treated group solicited supporting letters at lower rates. Our findings therefore suggest that “low dose” interventions may promote diversity in STEM fields but may also have the potential to expose underlying disparities when used alone or in a non-targeted way.

Quantifying Discrimination: The Role of Race and Gender in the Awarding of Subprime Mortgage Loans

The recent subprime mortgage crisis has brought to the forefront the possibility of discriminatory lending on the basis of race or gender. I explore these claims using approximately 10 million observations collected by the federal government in 2006 through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. I address two possible theories of discrimination: (1) structural discrimination, which is that any discriminatory lending patterns are picking up the fact that minority borrowers went to different lenders, and (2) individual discrimination, which is the possibility that individual lenders discriminated against identically situated borrowers. The results provide some evidence of both. However, a sensitivity test to examine the effect of missing controls (such as credit score) finds that these racial differences could be explained by a 50% difference in negative credit attributes between blacks and whites under structural discrimination, and 17% difference under individual discrimination.