Shawn Treier

Comparing Ideal Points Across Institutions and Time

Many spatial theories of policymaking in the context of a system of checks and balances require the estimation of ideal points which are comparable across institutions. This analysis evaluates comparisons between the president, Senate, and House. For applications which presume that legislators change their positions over time, the most commonly used estimates impose too many restrictions on the ideal points. I consider an alternative approach to creating a common scale by using interest groups (American Conservative Union [ACU] and Americans for Democratic Action [ADA]) as reference actors and incorporating “bridge votes,” roll calls on which the House and Senate vote on identical text. The analysis demonstrates this approach can produce comparable estimates across time and chamber.

Diversity, Deliberation, and Judicial Opinion Writing

Underlying scholarly interest in diversity is the premise that a representative body contributes to robust decision-making processes. Using an innovative measure of opinion content, we examine this premise by analyzing deliberative outputs in the US courts of appeals (1997–2002). While the presence of a single female or minority did not affect the attention to issues in the majority opinion, panels composed of a majority of women or minorities produced opinions with significantly more points of law compared to panels with three Caucasian males.

Voting for a Founding: Testing the Effect of Economic Interests at the Federal Convention of 1787

Previous work measuring the voting patterns of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention largely focused on either individual delegate positions for a handful of key votes or on state delegation positions for a far broader set of votes. We remedy this limitation by modeling the key first two months of the Convention including both some individual-level and all delegation-level voting, while simultaneously estimating the effect of various economic interests on that voting, controlling for various cultural and ideological factors. The findings suggest that economic factors mattered a great deal at the Convention. The effect of such interests vary however by the dimension of debate—representation, national institutional design, or federalism. We conclude that economic interests exerted a powerful influence on the deep structure of voting at Convention, though not consistently by issue or dimension. Specific interests only mattered on specific dimensions.