Our research speaks to the ongoing debate over the extent and severity of partisan political divisions in American society. We employ behavioral experiments to probe for affective polarization using dictator, trust, and public goods games with party identification treatments. We find that subjects who identify politically with the Democratic or Republican Party and ideologically as liberals and conservatives display stronger affective biases than politically unaffiliated and ideological moderates. Partisan subjects are less altruistic, less trusting, and less likely to contribute to a mutually beneficial public good when paired with members of the opposing party. Compared to other behavioral studies, our research suggests increasing levels of affective polarization in the way Americans relate to one another politically, bordering on the entrenched divisions one commonly sees in conflict or post-conflict societies. To overcome affective polarization, our research points to inter-group contact as a mechanism for increasing trust and bridging political divides.
Were the initial apportionments of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate inevitable? This article determines the coalitional stability of apportionment rules considered at the Constitutional Convention assuming the Convention limited itself to the rules proposed. Using each state's vote share as a measure of state preference, we find that the stability of legislative apportionment depended upon the states making decisions. Equal apportionment was in equilibrium with 13 states present, as in the Continental Congress, but when Rhode Island and New Hampshire were absent during the first third of the Convention, all rules were in a top cycle. With New York departing near the middle of the Convention, equal apportionment and the Three-Fifths Clause both became stable, and the Great Compromise was reached. We conclude that the Great Compromise was partly the result of historical contingency (i.e., which states participated), rather than necessity.
Neuroscience proffers evidence that self-described conservatives have stronger fear responses and aversion to risk than self-described liberals. Combined with studies showing that judicial ideology drives the content of Supreme Court majority opinions, I argue that conservatism is linked to risk focus in Supreme Court majority opinions. I use the Language Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software on a sample of Supreme Court majority opinions, and find that conservative opinions score higher on the LIWC dimension called Risk Focus than liberal opinions. This effect is enhanced in criminal procedural cases. If conservative judges' perceptions of risk are inflated, and if such perceptions are reflected in the binding opinions that they author, then such opinions' heightened sense of risk may influence the perceptions of risk of lower-court judges, which may in turn affect their decision-making in such important areas as sentencing and convictions. Such a pattern raises important questions for the thousands of lower-court decisions which impact the basic liberties of American citizens. Objective. To determine whether judicial ideology affects the focus on risk of Supreme Court opinions. Methods. Original, random sampling of 1200-1300 Court opinions; use of LIWC software to analyze risk focus of each opinion; regression analysis of ideology on risk focus. Results. As ideology becomes more conservative, the Court's opinions demonstrate increased evidence of focus on risk. This effect is pronounced in criminal procedure cases. Conclusion. The theory is supported. Increasingly conservative Court opinions demonstrate an increased focus on risk.
The objective of this paper is to combine two orthogonal conceptions of political liberty into one heuristic. The liberal and republican conceptions of liberty are the dominant explanations of political liberty: the former consisting in the absence of restraint, and the latter in the absence of domination. I argue that neither of these conceptions is adequate on its own. Using either in isolation leads to gaps, occasions in which we might wish to describe a person as unfree without the resources from either conception allowing us to do so. Therefore, I provide a heuristic that allows combining both conceptions into one conceptual plane. I hope also to describe the underlying dimension on which I place both the liberal and republican conceptions, invoking Nussbaum’s and Sen’s conceptions of capabilities.
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