Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The singular act of a Member of Congress placing a roll call vote in the US House, either yea or nay, occurred over five and a half million times from the 80th to 100th Congress. Using a dataset that links a large variety of exogenous factors to each of those acts of voting, this paper seeks to identify the development of “inter-party partisanship” (how opposed are the Democrats and Republicans to one another?) and “intra-party” partisanship, (how cohesively do members of the same party vote together?).

The first section of this paper examines the scope of roll call voting in the post war US House, detailing the number, distribution, and variety of roll call votes held in that period. Following that, the second section examines methods that can be used to identify inter-party partisanship, including updated uses of Lowell and Rice measures. In addition, party and vote are correlated for each roll call vote to create another measure of inter-party partisanship – one that is explored by Clausen roll call topics.

The paper goes on to examine intra-party partisanship by looking at predictors of partisan defection. Using a variety of methods culminating in a comprehensive Logit model, we are able to parse out many of the causal predictors of defection – roll call characteristics, member characteristics, constituency characteristics, and electoral marginality. We find that while no magic bullet exists that can overwhelmingly account for variance in the probability of a member defecting, several patterns emerge that indicate the large role roll call characteristics and member characteristics have in predicting defection.

Please email me (after 15 October) at danielsinger@comcast.net for full paper

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan are the only post-Soviet states that underwent “colored revolutions” between 2003 and 2005,1 mass protests, which toppled incumbent governments. One factor that appears of central importance but has so far received little attention is the unique role assumed by the courts in supporting the process of these revolutions. In addition to street protests, the political opposition actively used litigation to expose vote fraud and annul election results. Unexpectedly, Constitutional Courts in Georgia and Ukraine, often heralded as champions of the rule of law and democratic values, had little or no role at all in these revolutions. Unexpectedly, Supreme Courts, which are staffed with Soviet-era judges recruited and trained through the same system, cancelled rigged elections, thus opening the way for a peaceful change of government.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: The last years have witnessed the development of a great body of literature about judicial independence. One of the most interesting and provocative theoretical arguments has been put forward by Helmke in the ‘Strategic Defection’ Theory. In a series of papers and conferences, and particularly in her influential book Courts under Constraints, Helmke develops a rational choice approach to the problem of judicial independence in unstable regimes. She theorized that Justices of the Argentinean Supreme Court shaped their decisions in cases involving the government, depending on the underlying political environment. She claimed that, under some specific conditions, justices decided against the incumbents because of constraints faced vis-à-vis the incoming government.
In our paper, we seek to develop the foundations of a cross-country study of the Strategic Defection theory. After outlining the basics of Helmke’s theory we examine a series of problems confronting the development of a thorough cross national test, including how to define “regime change”, defection from authoritarian versus democratic regimes, problems of information and measurement, the ‘inter-temporal conflict of interest’, identifying the key issues for the incoming government, the problem of determining whether judges’ votes express their sincere preferences rather than strategic concerns, and whether the assumption of a strong executive may be generalized to all relevant cases.
We seek to test Justices’ votes in National High Courts with judicial review jurisdiction in countries with a documented history of political instability. After developing an approach for a broad cross national study, we provide a preliminary analysis of decision making in the Philippines, Venezuela, South Africa, and Canada. All of these countries (except Canada) experienced some kind of regime change that has been previously documented and analyzed. Canada is included as a control to examine the level of support for the government in a stable democracy. The preliminary results provide some support for strategic defection theory in South Africa, but the case of the Philippines does not appear to be consistent with strategic defection theory.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Neural tube defects (NTDs) are serious birth defects of the brain and spine that affect approximately 3,000 pregnancies in the United States each year and affected over 400 pregnancies in Puerto Rico from 1996 to 2002. Consuming the B vitamin folic acid can reduce the incidence of NTDs 50-70%, and recent efforts to reduce NTD rates have focused on increasing the number of childbearing aged women who take a vitamin containing folic acid every day. To this end, two exploratory, qualitative studies were conducted in order to (a) understand the complexity of vitamin use among women in the U.S. and Puerto Rico and (b) serve as a foundation on which to develop national communication and education interventions. Results indicated that campaign messages designed to increase folic acid use through multivitamin supplementation in the U.S. must address women’s barriers to vitamin use (e.g., cost, time), increase women’s perceived need for multivitamins (e.g., identify immediate, tangible results from taking a daily multivitamin), and address the relationship between daily food choices and the need for supplementation. Future campaign messages in Puerto Rico must focus on many of these same issues, in addition to increasing women’s knowledge about when folic acid should be taken in relation to pregnancy and addressing women’s perceptions that vitamins cause weight gain (an undesirable outcome for most participants). The practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Game theorists have intensively studied decision-making within discrete games. As an example, the circumstances under which people are more or less likely to cooperate in a Prisoner’s Dilemma are now quite well known. More recently theorists such as Tsebelis (1991) and Bednar and Page (2006) have been expanding the range of questions by investigating nesting and linked games. Others, such as Orbell, et. al, (2004) have used an evolutionary approach to examine how we might be selected for choosing between games. I follow up on Orbell, et. al.’s computer simulation by conducting (what appears to be) the first laboratory experiment in game choice. Subjects participating in the experiment had a choice between entering a Prisoner’s Dilemma with another subject, or forcing a Hawk-Dove interaction, when the payoff structure is favorable to either game. No increase in cooperation is found, but prisoner’s dilemma players are less inclined to play the hawk strategy in the hawk-dove game.