Public School Finance in California: the Golden Age On several occasions, significant changes were made in the way the public schools in California were financed. Major reforms were also made in the state's tax structure. What did not change was the nature of the state's commitment to public education. From the time of Read more…
Policing for Profit: The Political Economy of Law Enforcement In recent years numerous observers have raised concerns about "policing for profit'' or the deployment of law enforcement resources to raise funds for cash-strapped jurisdictions. However, identifying the causal effect of fiscal incentives on law enforcement behavior has remained elusive. We model Read more…
The Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump symposium will bring together leading political scientists from across the country to explore his radical revision to US foreign policy. In doing so, we hope to better understand the key components of foreign policy in the Age of Trump and their likely Read more…
Citizen Competence and Democratic Governance Competing traditions in public opinion scholarship offer strikingly divergent understandings of the role citizens can and do play in democratic governance. Some scholars argue that most citizens are poor decision makers who are woefully uninformed and easily manipulated. Others believe that public opinion is “rational” Read more…
Political Violence in China: Terrorism, Official Media, and Political Priorities Most scholars agree that autocracies enjoy a key counterterrorism advantage, namely the ability to control information. In reality, the information strategies of autocracies are much more sophisticated. To better understand these strategic considerations, we explore why the Chinese Communist Party Read more…
White Identity and the Emergence of the Republican Party in the Early-20th Century South (Co-authored with Boris Heersink, Fordham University) We explore the relationship between white identity, the GOP, and the South, by examining the role that white identity played in the Republican Party’s emergence in the former Confederacy prior to Read more…
"When Citizens Peek Behind the Bureaucratic Veil: An Experiment in Shaping Public Opinion" In this paper, we plan to conduct a novel experiment to test whether Americans form their opinions on executive agency decisions based on whether those decisions are framed as emerging from either technocratic or democratic deliberative processes. Read more…
Unbundling Polarization Chad Kendall will discuss his co-authored research on investigating the determinants of political polarization, a phenomenon of increasing relevance in Western democracies. How much of polarization is driven by divergence in the ideologies of politicians? How much is instead the result of changes in the capacity of parties to Read more…
"Implementing Particularism: Bureaucracy and the Distribution of Federal Grants" Under what conditions do bureaucrats implement policy on behalf of the President? Do ideology and politicization condition agency implementation of presidential particularism with respect to the distribution of federal grants? I develop a novel theory of the implementation of presidential policy Read more…
Bureaucratic Agency Problems and Legislative Oversight (co-authored with Abby K. Wood, USC Gould and Sean Gailmard, UC Berkeley) This paper empirically analyzes legislative oversight of bureaucracy in the US as a means to mitigate agency problems that units of Congress face with the bureaucracy. We develop a principal-agent model of Read more…
A Woman’s Voice in the House: Gender Composition and its Consequences in Committee Hearings Do increasing numbers of women in Congress lead to more representation of women’s voices during the legislative process? Using committee hearing transcripts from 1995-2017, Pamela analyzes how increasing the proportions of women interacts with measures of Read more…
Negotiating Bicameral Compromise Legislators encode their policy choices in the text of bills they propose, debate, and pass. The textual choices made and the shared elements of the language in House versus Senate bills provide a window to policy conflict and compromise in a bicameral setting. To characterize the nature Read more…
HOLD THE DATE! More information will be posted soon. This workshop is open to USC students & faculty.
Abby Wood, USC Gould School of Law, to discuss "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 Read more…
Kevin Esterling and Marci Harris present a report that notes Congress struggles to keep pace with increasingly rapid technological advances. Kevin Esterling and Marci Harris will present a report by the American Political Science Association Task Force on Congressional Reform Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation that assesses the current status Read more…