American Politics Seminar

American Politics Seminar

This workshop serves as a forum for the presentation and discussion of research by graduate students and faculty in American Politics (AP). For graduate students, this seminar is an opportunity to hear and present practice job talks, dissertation chapters, and conference papers. Occasional workshop sessions will feature research presentations by faculty from The Ohio State and major scholars from other universities.

Questions? Please contact Assistant Professor, and AP Seminar coordinator, Melinda Ritchie, ritchie.196@osu.edu 

Fall 2024 Presentations

AP seminar will be on Thursdays at 12pm this semester. Given the noon time slot, feel free to make the seminar a brown bag and bring along your lunch! The seminar will meet in the Spencer Room (Derby 2130) except on Sept. 26th, when we will meet in the Reading Room (Derby 2174).

Sept 19, 2024, Arvind Krishnamurthy, "How Administrative Burden Shapes Police Accountability." 

Abstract: Municipalities frequently use civilian oversight agencies to facilitate accountability for police departments by regulating civilian complaints against police officers. However, to get a complaint adjudicated, there are often substantial follow-through costs. This paper argues that the administrative burden associated with complaint filing reduces the likelihood that civilian oversight agencies provide any form of meaningful bureaucratic oversight. We test this theory by analyzing a policy change from a large police accountability board: Following the onset of COVID-19, the board shifted mandatory investigative interviews from in-office to video calls, eliminating complainant travel requirements. Our incident-level data reveals that this policy change led to a 16 percentage point reduction in complaint truncation. Before the policy change, each additional hour of travel time increased truncation rates by 2.5 percentage points, but after the policy change, travel time is unrelated to truncation rate. These findings suggest that administrative burden is a significant barrier to effective civilian oversight of police agencies.

Sept 26, 2024, Bear Brown, "The Heartbeat of Democracy and the Pulse of “the People”: Anti-Elite Appeals in Congressional Campaigns." 

Abstract: I develop a novel theoretical conception of anti-elitism to track rhetoric in American congressional elections that is often described as “populist”. I ground this empirically by using a dictionary-based method of text analysis to study rhetoric used on congressional campaign websites from the 2020 and 2022 Congressional Elections. Every major party candidate has an associated “Anti-Elite Score” that proxies the strength of their anti-elitism. Democratic candidates and non-challenger candidates had stronger anti-elite appeals than their counterparts on average. Conversely, Black candidates had weaker anti-elite appeals than non-Black candidates. The subgroups of interest (party, challenger, race) also differed in the content of their anti-elite rhetoric, with some groups favoring an economic angle, while others embraced language affirming who most deserves political representation.

Oct 3, 2024, Jungbae An, “Cooperation through communication in Congress."

Abstract: We study the discursive politics of congress, focusing on its deliberative opportunities and core concerns. The dominant aggregative model, by omitting cooperative legislation through congressional communication, fails to provide a rationale for members to invest in the self-governing capacity of congress. We challenge it by claiming that members, through mutual communication in congress, coordinate their cooperation as if they were a latent reference group. We construct congressional communication networks from the members’ speeches during the 98th-112th Congresses in the U.S. House of Representatives and find causal effects of the networks on the members’ voting similarity across the Congresses. We find that congressional communication is an active peer search among pairs that would be unlikely to interact in the absence of communication. The effects of communication are shown to have a counterbalancing relationship with party influence. 

Oct 17, 2024, Julia Park, “DALiSM: A Discourse Analysis framework for Legislative and Social Media texts.”

Abstract: How can we capture the dynamics of deliberation in a debate? In an increasingly divided and misinformed world, understanding the dynamics of who is arguing and what they are arguing about is becoming more and more important for fostering a meaningful exchange of ideas. There is a great opportunity: massive amounts of debate data are readily available, ranging from: (a) formal proceedings, such as committee hearings in legislatures, to (b) online discussion forums, such as Reddit. Here we introduce DALiSM, an argument centric framework, to capture discourse dynamics in diverse and multi-party spaces at scale. We develop methods to harness and extend the state-of-the-art in computational argument mining for: (a) extracting arguments from long-form raw texts, (b) calculating the intensity of a discourse event, and (c) modeling the evolution of discourse over time. We deploy our framework in a comprehensive and interactive dashboard for dynamically viewing the outputs of DALiSM and to clearly understand the nature of a discourse event. To showcase the importance and utility of DALiSM we apply our framework to U.S. Congressional committee hearings from 2005 to 2023 (109th to 117th Congresses), and to selected Reddit communities from 2008 to 2023. This case study offers invaluable substantive insights regarding deliberative behavior in online and offline spaces.

and “Rhetoric for the Win: The Strategic Use of Morality in Social Media."

Abstract: Morality has significant political implications, including its role in fueling partisan bias and reinforcing echo chambers. Given the well-documented impact of politicians on public opinion, it is crucial to understand when and why politicians employ moral rhetoric in their online statements. Using over 3.3 million tweets posted by members of the 113-117th U.S. Congresses, we show that members tend to use moral rhetoric as an electoral strategy. Specifically, proximity to elections, safe seats, and low voter turnout are important determinants of their rhetorical choice. In addition, we find that there has been a striking upward trend in members’ use of moral rhetoric—a pattern that is consistent across political party, gender, and chamber. We investigate various mechanisms and identify two potential reasons: political polarization and enhanced electoral security might have motivated members to resort to moral appeals targeting their co-partisan supporters.

Oct 31, 2024, Maria Silfa, “Modern Federalism: How States Navigate and Shape Federal Directives.”

Dec 5, 2024, Alecia Nepaul

Spring 2024 Presentations

Jan 29, 2024, Nicole Yadon, “Examining the Connections between Skin Color, Perceptions of Policing, and Political Participation.”

Apr 1, 2024, Julia Park, “Bureaucrats in Congress: The Politics of Interbranch Information Sharing.”

Abstract: Congress often relies on bureaucrats to provide information for policy production. However, scholars lack an empirical understanding of what drives information sharing between bureaucrats and legislators. We argue that the partisan alignment between the two branches can determine the amount and type of information transmitted between them. Using comprehensive data on the agency affiliation, appointment type, and agency-level characteristics of each bureaucrat who testified in congressional committee hearings, as well as a new measure of the informational content of their testimonies, we show that less analytical information is transmitted under divided government. Further, we examine bureaucrat-legislator pair-level interactions in committee hearings and show that bureaucrats provide less analytical information when questioned by legislators who are presidential out-partisans than by legislators who are presidential co-partisans, and that this behavior is heightened among bureaucrats who are political appointees. These dynamics highlight the strategic information transmission between bureaucrats and members of Congress.

Apr 29, 2024, Bear Brown, "The Heartbeat of Democracy and the Pulse of the People: Anti-Elite Appeals in Congressional Contests." 

Spring 2023 Presentations

Feb 1, 2023, Emily Ann Israelson

Feb 8, 2023, Daniel Naftel 

Feb 22, 2023, Jungbae An

Mar 1, 2023, Charlene Stainfield 

Mar 8, 2023, Cara Nix

Mar 22, 2023, Bear Brown

Mar 29, 2023, Franshelly Ortiz 

Apr 5, 2023, Steph Pedron 

Apr 19, 2023, Katie Gouge  / Chandler L'Hommedieu  / Young-Gwan Yoon

2021-2022 Presentations

April 25, 2022, David Foster, Kenyon College

2020-2021 Presentations

Dec 4, 2020, Christina Kinane, Yale

Feb 19, 2021, Ethan Porter, GW

2016-2017 Presentations

Sept 14, 2016, Frances Lee, University of Maryland

Oct 12, 2016, Keith Poole, University of Georgia

Oct 26, 2016, Jeff Jenkins, University of Virginia

Nov 16, 2016, Thomas Leeper, London School of Economics

2015-2016 Presentations

Sept 17, 2015, Amber Boydstun, University of California, Davis

Oct 8, 2015, Efrén Pérez, Vanderbilt University

Nov 12, 2015, Melissa Marschall, Rice University

Jan 21, 2016, J. Eric Oliver, University of Chicago

Jan 28, 2016, Seth Masket, University of Denver

Mar 24, 2016, David Bateman, Cornell University

Apr 21, 2016, George Krause, University of Pittsburgh

Past Presentations

Sept 25, 2013, Justin Grimmer, Stanford University, “The Impression of Influence: How Legislator Communication and Government Spending Cultivate a Personal Vote.”
Paper

Oct 9, 2013, Neil Malhotra, Stanford University, “Why Do Asian Americans Identify as Democrats? Testing Theories of Social Exclusion and Group Solidarity." Co-authored with Alexander Kuo and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo.

Abstract: Why are Asian Americans overwhelmingly likely to identify as Democrats? Despite that (1) income and voting for the Republican Party are highly correlated, and (2) Asians are the most affluent ethnic group in the United States, Asians decisively vote for Democrats, not Republicans. We focus on two explanations to help resolve this puzzle: social exclusion and group solidarity. According to the first explanation, Asians perceive the Republican Party as excluding them from society and therefore not serving their interests. Social exclusion arises from Asians’ perceptions that they are viewed as less “American.” The second explanation, while not mutually exclusive, focuses on the propensity of Asian Americans to identify with other ethnic minority groups that already identify with the Democratic Party, and thus believe they have common interests with such groups rather than whites. With detailed observational data and two experimental studies, we find that social exclusion and group solidarity are important explanations for why Asians are more supportive of the Democratic Party. Our findings have important implications for the relevance of identity-oriented explanations to minority political behavior in American electoral politics.

Oct 16, 2013, Christopher Bonneau, University of Pittsburgh, “Getting Things Straight: The Effects of Ballot Design and Electoral Structure on Voter Participation.” 

Abstract: This paper considers the implications of the straight--party voting option (STVO) on participation in judicial elections. Voters using straight--party options (by definition) do not vote for candidates in nonpartisan elections. Consequently, ballot roll--off in these elections is more likely to occur when people are given the chance to vote the party ticket and complete the voting process quickly. This is the case because nonpartisan judicial elections are considerably less salient than statewide and federal partisan elections. This article separates out the effects of the institutional structure of the election on political participation with the effects of ballot structure. We find that in nonpartisan elections, the straight--party option decreases voter participation since voters who utilize the straight-ticket option may erroneously believe that they have voted for these nonpartisan offices, or simply ignore them. However, in nonpartisan elections without straight-ticket voting, participation is increased compared to nonpartisan elections with straight--ticket voting. Additionally, both forms of nonpartisan elections have less participation than partisan elections, all of which have the straight--ticket option. Thus, voter participation is affected not only by the type of election, but the type of voting rules in the election.

Nov 13, 2013, Yanna Krupnikov, Northwestern University, "Saving Face: Identifying Voter Responses to Black and Female Candidates."

Abstract: Much of what we know about public opinion and political behavior comes from survey and experimental research. Yet the accuracy of survey data is threatened by the possibility that social desirability pressures contaminate self-reporting. We address this threat in a project that considers research on voter responses to black candidates and female candidates in the United States. Such research is often plagued by the possibility that social desirability pressures inflate self-reports of support for these candidates. Therefore, we present a psychological approach to reduce social desirability pressures. We analyze this approach across three commonly used samples: undergraduate, adult convenience, and nationally representative. Our results suggest that existing research overestimates voter support for black and female candidates. 
Paper

Mar 19, 2013, Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College, "Tipping the Scales? Testing for Political Influence on Public Corruption Prosecutions."

Abstract: As both officers of the court and political appointees, U.S. attorneys face a conflict of interest in cases involving the two major political parties. We find evidence of partisan differences in the timing of public corruption case filings around elections — a setting in which politics are salient but bias is difficult to observe. Unlike co-partisans, individuals associated with the party that opposes the president are substantially more likely to be charged immediately before an election than afterward. We find a corresponding decrease in case duration before elections for opposition partisans, suggesting that prosecutors are moving more quickly to file cases. By contrast, severe charges are more likely to be filed against co-partisans immediately after elections relative to before, suggesting that cases that are potentially damaging to the president’s party are being deferred. However, prosecutors do not appear to be bringing weaker cases against opposition partisans before elections; we find no measurable difference in conviction rates. In fact, co-partisan defendants received less favorable treatment in plea bargains and sentencing until recently — a discrepancy we attribute to greater potential for external scrutiny.