Committee seats are not always good
Legislative committees have substantial power over the legislative process. Most enjoy negative agenda control—meaning that they can prevent any bill…
Author: Ilayda Yücel
You and Whose Army? How Leaders Politicize Military Advice in Foreign Policy
Americans have little trust in political institutions with one notable exception: the U.S. armed forces. In 2019, 73 percent of…
Loyal Leaders, Affluent Agencies: The Budgetary Implications of Political Appointments in the Executive Branch
Can elected representatives control the decisions of unelected bureaucrats? In our forthcoming article, we argue that political competition can often…
Venality in a Hierarchical Bureaucracy: What can go wrong?
A key feature of bureaucratic organizations is the use of vertical arrangements to enhance their performance. Namely, to rely on…
How Fracking Increased Inequality in Political Participation
Over the past fifteen years, the US energy sector has been transformed by innovations in the extraction of natural gas…
Irrelevant Events like College Football Games Do Not Likely Influence Elections
Previous studies claim that politically irrelevant events influence voting behavior. For example, droughts, floods, tornadoes, shark attacks, and even college…
A call for an open science approach to improve the transparency of observational research
The credibility of scientific inquiry depends on researchers’ ability to replicate previous findings. However, publication biases that favor statistically significant…
Does desert matter to social justice?
Would a just society be more equal, economically? John Rawls’s theory of justice is famous for three principles that speak…
I´m Speaking! Interruptions in Legislative Speeches and Women´s Strategic Behavior
For decades, the literature on gender and legislative politics has explored the increasing female political representation (Geys and Mause 2014;…
Collateral Damage from a Targeted Recall Campaign: How Efforts to Remove Judge Aaron Persky Affected the Behavior of Other California Judges (and What This Tells Us About Electoral Incentives More Generally)
On January 28, 2015, Brock Turner, a Stanford student athlete, sexually assaulted Chanel Miller, a visiting student. (Miller has expressed…