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Ideologies of Organized Interests & Amicus Curiae Briefs We provide a novel measure of ideology for amicus curiae briefs and organized interests with accompanying uncertainty estimates. Our Amicus Curiae Network scores cover more than 12,000 unique groups and more than 11,000 briefs across 95 years, providing the largest and longest measure of organized interest ideologies to date. Substantively, the scores reveal that: interests before the Court are ideologically polarized, despite variance in their coalition strategies; interests that donate to campaigns are more conservative and balanced than those that do not; and amicus curiae briefs were more common from liberal organizations until the 1980s, with ideological representation virtually balanced since then.

The Increasingly Negative Partisanship of Republican Elites We develop a broadly applicable class of coevolving latent space network with attractors (CLSNA) models. We apply the CLSNA to understand the dynamics of partisan polarization on social media, where we expect Republicans and Democrats to increasingly interact with their own party and disengage with the opposing party. Our analysis confirms the existence of partisan polarization in social media interactions among both political elites and the public. Moreover, while positive partisanship is the driving force of interactions across the full periods of study for both the public and Democratic elites, negative partisanship has come to dominate Republican elites’ interactions since the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Correcting the President's Misinformation on Twitter We conduct a survey experiment that evaluates the effect of presidential tweets on support for executive policies, including proposed unilateral action, and studies the effect of social media corrections of those tweets. We find little evidence that social media appeals move public opinion overall, although they do increase support among Republicans.  Corrections generally worked as intended among Democrats but backfired among Republicans, cancelling each other out in the aggregate.  The findings offer important insights into the efficacy of going public on social media and of corrections to such claims in an era of stark partisan polarization.

Ask Only What Your Country Can Do for You Providing representation entails making choices about prioritizing the needs of diverse groups within one’s constituency. While citizens cannot reasonably expect that representatives will cater to their particular interests or priorities all the time, we know little about citizens’ expectations in this regard. We find that citizens are generally egocentric, in that they expect a representative to cater to personally relevant interests even when such interests are not an important part of the representative’s constituency. Moreover, we find that this egocentrism is not mitigated through the provision of information about the district’s diversity or composition, indicating that voter ignorance about the nature of constituencies is not the primary cause of these expectations.

Why Did Sanders Beat the Viable Frontrunner in 2016 but Not in 2020? We show that it has little to do with each candidate’s faults or strengths and more to do with changes and the expansion of the Michigan Democratic primary between 2016 and 2020. Although Clinton may have had more negatives than Biden in 2016, Biden was still near the bottom of the 2020 field in terms of voter favorability. His support was clearly a function of viability and appeal across moderate and liberal Democrats. In contrast, Sanders’s appeal to Michigan liberal voters was fairly consistent, but failed to expand to the more moderate portion of the electorate. Unfortunately for Sanders, this portion of the electorate became larger in the 2020 primary.

The Party Base, the Economy and Unilateral Action While co-partisan support emboldens presidents to issue more unilateral actions, the effects for independent and opposition party approval are substantially larger. Across the range of lagged co-partisan approval, executive actions increase by less than a half of an action on average. By contrast, when presidents see their approval rating among independents or the opposition party grow their expected number of executive actions jumps. The difference in opposition approval at 10% versus 70%, for example, equates with one more executive action the next month. We see a similar gain in executive actions should independents move from 30% to full support.

Applying the Frailty ERGM (FERGM) Through six substantive applications (MesaHigh, Florentine Marriage, Military Alliances, Militarized Interstate Disputes, Regional Planning, Brain Complexity), we illustrate how unobserved heterogeneity and confounding can lead to degenerate inferential network model specifications and errors, as well as poor model fit. The figure shows the improvements made by accounting for unit-level heterogeneity with the FERGM. The percent improvement is calculated as the difference in the mean accuracy of tie prediction for the FERGM relative to the ERGM across 500 simulations. Across most of these networks, we find a fairly large increase in the percent of ties accurately predicted by using the FERGM.

The Surprising Scarcity of Executive Orders Is there a relationship between executive orders and presidential approval? This study presents systematic evidence that public opinion constrains presidents’ exercise of their unilateral powers. Across two different measures of significant unilateral activity, we find that increases in approval embolden presidents to issue important unilateral directives. By contrast, decreases in approval heighten the risks of political pushback and encourage presidents to forgo opportunities to move policy unilaterally. These results challenge the venerable strategic model of unilateral action, arguing that presidents resort to unilateralism when their political position is weak.

Is Animosity for Candidates Driven by Polarization or Personality? Top-right figure illustrates the over time changes in the thermometer ratings for one’s own party and the other party. Partisan polarization has been increasing steadily since 1992, due to lower ratings for the other party. The trend in ideological distance, to its left, provides similar support for negative partisanship. All four of the candidate traits saw substantial increases in the difference between own and other party candidate evaluations, though the divergence for some occurs more recently than for others. In all cases the middle of the distribution has largely moved to the tails for the other candidate, with the general effect on the distribution looking evenly distributed around the mean or nearly flat in the 80s to more bimodal in recent years.

Interest Groups and Legislative Success Dear Colleague letters provide insights into the information that members use to both influence and make policy decisions. We demonstrate that endorsements in these letters from particularly well-connected interest groups are invaluable cues for members with limited information early in the legislative process and help grow the list of bill cosponsors. As bills progress, such groups have less direct weight, while legislation supported by a larger number of organizations and a larger number of cosponsors is more likely to pass.

Predicting Elections & Detecting Public Opinion in Web Browsing Figure shows the difference in preference for the Democratic candidate before versus after the Comey letter, specifically, the average Democratic preference on Fri-Mon across the six weeks prior to October 28, minus the average Democratic preference on Fri-Mon subsequent to October 28. The popular shift away from Clinton was stronger in the west and midwest of the country. In some cases, outliers can be understood as a result of small sample sizes (Wyoming,Oklahoma, North Dakota). However, overall it is clear that there were moves away from Clinton in some states with extremely close margins.

Legitimacy's Negativity Bias after Court Decisions We find evidence of both sensitivity to outputs and negativity bias for the gay marriage issue. Greater support for gay marriage is associated with higher legitimacy rankings to begin with. However, those most supportive of gay marriage did not massively reward the Court. Rather, the “losers,” or those that were most opposed to gay marriage, were more likely to punish the Court with lower legitimacy evaluations immediately following the DOMA decision.

Interest Group Network Dynamics A dynamic network of amicus curiae brief cosigners across 50 years. Nodes refer to organizations with cosigning ties drawn for each time period. Node size is proportional to degree in the first time period. Node color refers to the SIC division with darker colors indicating higher divisions. Graph layout algorithm is GV’s Neato. Interest group relationships are both created and dissolved over time. A separable temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM) shows that the number ofpartners is important for formation but not dissolution, while industrial homophilyhelps both to make and maintain connections.

The Frailty Exponential Random Graph Model Panels show the (scaled) root mean squared error for coffecient estimates on the vertical axis and the level of the unobserved heterogeneity on the horizontal axis from the Monte Carlo study. Each column shows networks of different sizes. Each row the results for a different covariate. Results for the ERGM are reported as dotted lines and open circles, while the FERGM are shown as solid lines and closed circles. On average, the FERGM performs better than the standard ERGM in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity.

What Drives Support for Unilateral Action? Through a series of five survey experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we examine the extent to which Americans evaluate unilateral action based on constitutional, partisan, and policy concerns. We find that Americans do not instinctively reject unilateral action as a threat to our system of checks and balances, but instead evaluate unilateral action in terms of whether it accords or conflicts with their partisan and policy preference priors.

Recruiting Large Online Samples from MTurk, Facebook, & Qualtrics Some have attributed the heavy concentration of MTurk workers in Kerala and Tamil Nadu to demographic factors, such as higher levels of education and English-language fluency, as well as to the existence of MTurk “factories.” We find little evidence for either explanation. The demographic similarities among our three samples suggest that each is drawing from a similar class of well-educated, technologically-savvy respondents.

Cross-Pressures & Public Support for Fracking Subjects whose partisan identity conflicts with their personal beliefs about global warming are particularly susceptible to persuasion on the grounds of benefits. Among subjects with conflicting partisan and policy predispositions support for fracking was much higher in the benefits treatment than in the control group. By contrast, among subjects whose partisanship and global warming beliefs were aligned, the benefits treatment had only a very modest effect.