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PIPE Workshop featuring Christian Fong

as to whether legislators bring this preference for reciprocity to Congress. Through an original survey experiment and observational studies of end-of-career behavior, Christian finds consistent evidence that legislators have an intrinsic preference for reciprocity. Moreover, legislators are aware that their colleagues have this preference, so it likely enters into their strategic calculations. This finding raises new questions for research in party discipline, partisan polarization, and interest group influence, and others.

PIPE Workshop featuring Michael Hankinson

“The Supply-Equity Trade-off: The Effect of Spatial Representation on the Local Housing Supply”

Michael Hankinson, assistant professor of Political Science at George Washington University, will discuss his research. A central concern of governance is how the costs and benefits of collective goods are distributed over the population. Our findings speak to a trade-off inherent to spatial representation: the supply of collective goods and the equitable distribution of the associated costs.

Timely election administration and technology symposium draws leading scholars

Going into the 2020 election, popular fear of interference, fraud, or election meddling, means that leveraging the tools of rigorous social science is as important as ever.

Participants in the USC Bedrosian Center’s Symposium on Election Administration and Technology skillfully brought data, theory, and logic to bear on questions often driven by reflexive fear, anger, or confusion.

Bedrosian Director is founding editor of Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy – new in 2020

Jeffery A. Jenkins, Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director, Bedrosian Center, and Director, PIPE Collaborative, has been announced as the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy with first issues releasing in 2020. Jenkins Read more…

PIPE* Research: Abby K. Wood, USC, Gould School of Law

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…

PIPE* Workshop: Ben Graham, USC

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…

Benjamin Newman

Creativity, Energy, & Experimentation In this episode of the PS You’re Interesting podcast, Jeff Jenkins and Benjamin Newman, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the UC Riverside, discuss creativity and experimentation in political science. As a young scholar, Ben was interested in figuring out why people have the opinions Read more…

PIPE Workshop: Kathleen Bawn, UCLA

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.

First annual political institutions, economy conference highlights cross-disciplinary collaboration

With the goal of fostering cross-disciplinary synergies among political economy scholars and fill the need for a regular meeting place, the USC PIPE Collaborative hosted the First Annual Political Institutions and Political Economy Conference on March 15-16, convening major U.S. scholars from political science, economics, and law to cover important new research on topics such as the unilateral presidency, Congressional committees, city policies, electoral rules, political leadership, and partisanship.

PIPE* Workshop: John Matsusaka, USC Marshall School of Business

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.

Bedrosian Center