Polarization of U.S. Circuit Court Judges: A Machine Learning Approach

Ash, Elliott; Chen, Daniel L.; Lu, Wei

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2993009

Cited by 2 publications

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“…But recent empirical work has documented that judges do respond to non-legal influences, political and otherwise (Berdejó and Yuchtman, 2013, Ash and MacLeod, 2015, 2017, Chen, Moskowitz and Shue, 2016, Berdejó and Chen, 2017, and Cohen and Yang, 2018. In addition, there is evidence suggesting that the judiciary has become more conservative over time (e.g., Naidu, 2017, Ash, Chen andLu, 2017). This research asks whether we can attribute a causal influence to partisan news media in this trend.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel

Ash¹,

Poyker²

2019

SSRN Journal

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Exposure to conservative news causes judges to impose harsher criminal sentences. Our evidence comes from an instrumental variables analysis, where randomness in television channel positioning across localities induces exogenous variation in exposure to Fox News Channel. These treatment data on news viewership are taken to outcomes data on almost 7 million criminal sentencing decisions in the United States for the years 2005-2017. Higher Fox News viewership increases incarceration length, and the effect is stronger for black defendants and for drug-related crimes. We can rule out changes in the behavior of police, prosecutors, or potential offenders as significant drivers. Consistent with changes in voter attitudes as the key mechanism, the effect on sentencing harshness is observed for elected, but not appointed, judges.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel

Ash¹,

Poyker²

2019

SSRN Journal

Self Cite

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“…As a result, certain words (for instance, the word "think") can be identified to be correlated with a particular behavior (for instance, the level of reasoning in the beauty-contest game, Penczynski, 2016). Coding practices in Economics for quasi-experimental (for instance, Freddi, 2017) and non-experimental (for instance, Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010;Hansen et al 2017;Gentzkow, Kelly, and Taddy, 2017;Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Taddy, 2017;Ash et al 2017) natural language data can provide guidance as to the use of software programs and machine learning techniques. The best practices might be transferred to the analysis of experimental free-form messages.…”

Section: Coding Software Machine Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communication in laboratory experiments

Brandts¹,

Cooper

Rott³

2019

Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Experimental Economics

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In this chapter we present a first survey of laboratory studies using communication. We first discuss a number of issues about the implementation of communication in the laboratory. In particular we discuss variations in the channels, the structure and the content analysis of communication. Second, we survey a number of studies in which the effects of free-form communication are compared to those with more restricted communication. We finish with a brief reference to the question why communication matters, to what the mechanisms through which communication affects behavior are. Table 1: Dimensions of communication 4 We do not cover communication in field experiments. CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATIONPossible channels of communication in laboratory experiments are paper-and-pencil messages, chat, audio, video, or face-to-face interactions. The following is an incomplete reference list. Paper-and-pencil (Charness and Dufwenberg 2006) and chat messages (Brandts, Charness, and Ellman, 2016;Brandts, Rott, and Sola, 2016) are sent in written form, whereas audio (Greiner et al. 2012), video (Brosig et al. 2003Greiner et al. 2012), and face-to-face messages (Isaac and Walker 1988;Bochet et al. 2006;Schram et al. forthcoming) are usually exchanged orally. In faceto-face communication, participants meet physically and verbally communicate with each other (for instance, Isaac and Walker, 1988).The main drawback of audio, video and face-to-face communication is that typically they do not allow for (complete) anonymity, which entails that the interaction between participants does not necessarily stop at the end of the experiment. 5 An additional limitation of face-to-face communication is the difficulty of creating a record of what has been said. By contrast, chat, audio, and video messages can be recorded, transmitted and analyzed at a later stage (for instance, to a subsequent generation as in Chaudhuri et al., 2009). a computerized experiment, a chat window opens (or participants have the option to open it) and participants can type in text messages. 6 STRUCTURE OF COMMUNICATIONWith the term 'structure' we refer here to the arrangements of who can communicate to whom, when, in what order, and how often. All these elements can be tightly controlled in the laboratory and this control allows for many potentially interesting variations. This makes it possible to study the general phenomenon of 'communication' in a very systematic way. We organize our discussion of structure into three subsections: network and direction, frequency/repetition, and order and timing. COMMUNICATION NETWORK AND DIRECTIONIn experiments involving only two participants the only issue is whether they both can communicate with the other participant or whether only one of the two can (and who it is). In experiments with more than two participants, there are even more possibilities, since now there are several options both with respect to who can talk to whom and who can listen to whom. The structure of these connections is what we refer to as communication netw...

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Polarization of U.S. Circuit Court Judges: A Machine Learning Approach

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel

Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel

Communication in laboratory experiments

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