Campaign Finance Transparency Affects Legislators’ Election Outcomes and Behavior Do audits by executive agencies impact the behavior of those audited? Does revealing negative information about legislators affect electoral results and behavior? Institutions that encourage transparency, such as campaign finance disclosure, influence mass and elite behavior. We theorize that greater transparency Read more…
by Nathan K. Micatka On March 14th and 15th 2019, the USC Bedrosian Center’s Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative hosted its 2nd Annual Conference. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines such as political science, economics, and public policy the conference covered topics from the succession of rulers in Read more…
by Casey Fischl
Chad Kendall discussed his paper, Unbundling Polarization, co-authored by Nathan Canen and Francesco Trebbi. His research investigates political polarization, an issue that is at an all-time high for Western democracies.
by Casey Fischl
Anthony Orlando discussed one of his current research projects, When Citizens Peek Behind the Bureaucratic Veil: An Experiment in Shaping Public Opinion, coauthored by Professor Bill Resh and Ph.D. student, Colin Leslie of the Sol Price School of Public Policy.
by Casey Fischl
Philip Potter discussed his research paper, “Political Violence in China: Terrorism, Official Media, and Political Priorities,” during the January 15, 2019 PIPE Workshop. His research focuses on terrorism and counterterrorism in China, to answer the question of why it is critical that the United States begins to pay more attention to the current state of affairs in China.
by Casey Fischl Jeffery A. Jenkins discussed his research paper, White Identity and the Emergence of the Republican Party in the Early-20th Century South, co-authored with Boris Heersink (Fordham University). The paper explores the relationship between white identity, the GOP, and the South. This topic is particularly timely considering Donald Trump’s victory Read more…
Ben Graham is an assistant professor at USC’s School of International Relations. Ben discussed his paper, Network Ties and the Political Strategies of Firms, co-written with Cesi Cruz. Abstract: Social ties are critical to firms’ ability to achieve influence over government policy, and it is widely accepted that better-connected firms achieve more influence. However, it Read more…
LaGina Gause discussed her research paper, The Advantage of Disadvantage: Protests, Resources, and Legislative Behavior. It is well documented that low-resource groups are disadvantaged in the political process. But, when low-resource groups can overcome barriers to engage in collective action – participation involving multiple participants publicly expressing a grievance – it suggests that Read more…
“Uncovering Discrimination in the Policing of Anti-Immigrant Hate Crime” With an increase in ethnically motivated hate crime, we explore the issue of the rigor in which law enforcement agencies police potential hate crime activity. We conducted a large-scale field experiment on roughly 6,800 police departments throughout the United States to test for Read more…
Congressional primaries, like primary elections in general, are imagined to give voters, rather than party elites, the ability to choose which candidate wins the nomination. Indeed, we might expect primary election outcomes to reflect the preferences of the median primary voter, in roughly the way we expect general election outcomes to reflect the preferences of the overall district median.
We challenge this conventional wisdom.
The Challenge of Measuring Political Polarization in the US over Time using Congressional Roll Call Votes Jeff Lewis is professor of Political Science, UCLA. He is also the current president of the Society for Political Methodology. His research and teaching are in the areas of quantitative methodology and American politics. Read more…
The Power of Economic Interests Under Direct versus Representative Democracy
The power of economic interest groups to influence policy outcomes is a common theme in economics and political science. Most theories posit that interest group power arises from the ability to influence elected or appointed government officials, that is, by exploiting the representative part of democracy. This paper examines an unstated implication of these theories, that special interest influence will be weaker under direct democracy, when there are no representatives involved.