Betsy Sinclair - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Betsy Sinclair

An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, 2015

As the study of political networks becomes more common in political science, greater attention to... more As the study of political networks becomes more common in political science, greater attention to questions of causality is warranted. This essay explores competing visions of causality in political networks. Independent essays address issues of statistical model specification, identification of multi-step personal influence, measurement error, causality in historical perspective, and the insights of field experiments. These essays do not agree

Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through thos... more Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research-that is, they focus on how electoral institutions affect the interactions between legislators. The authors use data on legislative voting behavior from the California State Assembly and exploit the changes that have been implemented in California's primary elections process over the past two decades. Specifically, they hypothesize that legislators who were elected during the years in which a nonpartisan blanket primary was used in California (1998 and 2000) will be more centrally networked and more likely to compromise with other legislators. They find evidence to support their hypothesis: legislators elected under the nonpartisan blanket primary are more likely to agree with other legislators. Electoral institutions, especially primary elections, have important effects on legislative behavior. The authors' results have implications for highly polarized state legislatures.

Political Research Quarterly, 2012

Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through thos... more Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research-that is, they focus on how electoral institutions affect the interactions between legislators. The authors use data on legislative voting behavior from the California State Assembly and exploit the changes that have been implemented in California's primary elections process over the past two decades. Specifically, they hypothesize that legislators who were elected during the years in which a nonpartisan blanket primary was used in California (1998 and 2000) will be more centrally networked and more likely to compromise with other legislators. They find evidence to support their hypothesis: legislators elected under the nonpartisan blanket primary are more likely to agree with other legislators. Electoral institutions, especially primary elections, have important effects on legislative behavior. The authors' results have implications for highly polarized state legislatures.

Political Communication, 2013

ABSTRACT

Political Analysis, 2012

Identifying causal effects attributable to network membership is a key challenge in empirical stu... more Identifying causal effects attributable to network membership is a key challenge in empirical studies of social networks. In this article, we examine the consequences of endogeneity for inferences about the effects of networks on network members' behavior. Using the House office lottery (in which newly elected members select their office spaces in a randomly chosen order) as an instrumental variable to estimate the causal impact of legislative networks on roll call behavior and cosponsorship decisions in the 105th–112th Houses, we find no evidence that office proximity affects patterns of legislative behavior. These results contrast with decades of congressional scholarship and recent empirical studies. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of accounting for selection processes and omitted variables in estimating the causal impact of networks.

Electoral Studies, 2008

Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. While there has been som... more Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. While there has been some research focused on who votes by absentee ballot, little research has considered another important question about absentee voting: Which absentee ballots are counted and which are not? Research following the 2000 presidential election has studied the problem of uncounted ballots for precinct voters but not for absentee voters. Using data from Los Angeles County -the nation's largest and most diverse voting jurisdiction -for the November 2002 general election, we test a series of hypothesis that certain types of ballots and voters have a higher likelihood that their ballots will be counted. We find that uniform service personnel, overseas civilians, voters who request non-English ballots and permanent absentee voters have a much lower likelihood of returning their ballot, and once returned, a lower likelihood that their ballots will be counted compared with the general absentee voting population. We conclude our paper with a discussion of the implications of our research for the current debates about absentee voting.

Election Law Journal, 2006

... and Fowler (2006) shows that strong connections often exist between legislators that represen... more ... and Fowler (2006) shows that strong connections often exist between legislators that represent ge-ographically proximate constituencies. ... voting behavior. Discussion and Conclusion As Sen. Connie Mack III's (R-FL) career in the Senate drew to a close by the end of 2000, the ...

Interpersonal communication presents experimental researchers with a methodological challenge and... more Interpersonal communication presents experimental researchers with a methodological challenge and a research opportunity. The challenge is that communication between subjects blurs the line between treatment and control conditions. When treatments are transmitted from subject to subject, the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) is violated, and comparison of treatment and control outcomes may provide a biased assessment of the treatment's causal influence. Social scientists are increasingly interested in the substantive phenomena that lead to SUTVA violations, such as communication in advance of an election. Experimental designs that gauge SUTVA violations provide useful insights into the extent and influence of interpersonal communication. This paper illustrates the value of one such design, a multi-level experiment in which treatments are randomly assigned to individuals and varying proportions of their neighbors. After discussing the theoretical and statistical underpinnings of this design, we apply it to a large-scale voter mobilization experiment conducted in Chicago during a special election in 2009 using the social pressure mailings pioneered by Gerber, Green and Larimer (2008).

American Politics Research, 2011

New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. We apply a variety of statistical techniques, inc... more New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. We apply a variety of statistical techniques, including propensity score matching methods, to compare the mayoral turnout of registered voters across flood depths. We find that registered voters who experienced more than six feet of flooding were more likely to participate in the mayoral election than registered voters who experienced less flooding. We attribute this to their increased motivation to participate in municipal politics in conjunction with voter mobilization efforts in the wake of Katrina. Our finding about the characteristics of the voters who participated in the mayoral election given the flooding provides us insights into the scope of change for the political landscape of New Orleans after the hurricane.

American Politics Research, 2011

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to... more Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

American Journal of Political Science, 2012

ABSTRACT Interpersonal communication presents a methodological challenge and a research opportuni... more ABSTRACT Interpersonal communication presents a methodological challenge and a research opportunity for researchers involved in field experiments. The challenge is that communication among subjects blurs the line between treatment and control conditions. When treatment effects are transmitted from subject to subject, the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) is violated, and comparison of treatment and control outcomes may provide a biased assessment of the treatment’s causal influence. Social scientists are increasingly interested in the substantive phenomena that lead to SUTVA violations, such as communication in advance of an election. Experimental designs that gauge SUTVA violations provide useful insights into the extent and influence of interpersonal communication. This article illustrates the value of one such design, a multilevel experiment in which treatments are randomly assigned to individuals and varying proportions of their neighbors. After describing the theoretical and statistical underpinnings of this design, we apply it to a large‐scale voter‐mobilization experiment conducted in Chicago during a special election in 2009 using social‐pressure mailings that highlight individual electoral participation. We find some evidence of within‐household spillovers but no evidence of spillovers across households. We conclude by discussing how multilevel designs might be employed in other substantive domains, such as the study of deterrence and policy diffusion.

Since the creation of the Internet, there has been a seemingly never-ending number of books and a... more Since the creation of the Internet, there has been a seemingly never-ending number of books and analyses about the role of the Internet in politics. Many of these books fail to keep in mind that the behavior of elites—the well-educated and politically active individuals who often represent the peer group of these authors—is not generally representative of the behavior of

California Journal of Politics and Policy, 2015

After California's adoption of the top two primary, voters faced the possibility of ballot choice... more After California's adoption of the top two primary, voters faced the possibility of ballot choices between co-partisan candidates (two Democrats, for example, or two Republicans). We use the publicly available Google Trends data, which provides the rate of searching for particular words, to evaluate whether Californians are more likely to search for the names of legislators who faced co-partisan challengers in their general election than to search for the names of legislators who faced opposite-partisan challengers in the general election. We find evidence of increased search for the general election and, moreover, find that there is no increase for the primary election, suggesting that when the typical voter loses a key electoral cue (the party label) the voter will rely upon other sources of information to make a voting decision.

Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, 2009

PS: Political Science & Politics, 2014

An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, 2015

As the study of political networks becomes more common in political science, greater attention to... more As the study of political networks becomes more common in political science, greater attention to questions of causality is warranted. This essay explores competing visions of causality in political networks. Independent essays address issues of statistical model specification, identification of multi-step personal influence, measurement error, causality in historical perspective, and the insights of field experiments. These essays do not agree

Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through thos... more Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research-that is, they focus on how electoral institutions affect the interactions between legislators. The authors use data on legislative voting behavior from the California State Assembly and exploit the changes that have been implemented in California's primary elections process over the past two decades. Specifically, they hypothesize that legislators who were elected during the years in which a nonpartisan blanket primary was used in California (1998 and 2000) will be more centrally networked and more likely to compromise with other legislators. They find evidence to support their hypothesis: legislators elected under the nonpartisan blanket primary are more likely to agree with other legislators. Electoral institutions, especially primary elections, have important effects on legislative behavior. The authors' results have implications for highly polarized state legislatures.

Political Research Quarterly, 2012

Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through thos... more Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research-that is, they focus on how electoral institutions affect the interactions between legislators. The authors use data on legislative voting behavior from the California State Assembly and exploit the changes that have been implemented in California's primary elections process over the past two decades. Specifically, they hypothesize that legislators who were elected during the years in which a nonpartisan blanket primary was used in California (1998 and 2000) will be more centrally networked and more likely to compromise with other legislators. They find evidence to support their hypothesis: legislators elected under the nonpartisan blanket primary are more likely to agree with other legislators. Electoral institutions, especially primary elections, have important effects on legislative behavior. The authors' results have implications for highly polarized state legislatures.

Political Communication, 2013

ABSTRACT

Political Analysis, 2012

Identifying causal effects attributable to network membership is a key challenge in empirical stu... more Identifying causal effects attributable to network membership is a key challenge in empirical studies of social networks. In this article, we examine the consequences of endogeneity for inferences about the effects of networks on network members' behavior. Using the House office lottery (in which newly elected members select their office spaces in a randomly chosen order) as an instrumental variable to estimate the causal impact of legislative networks on roll call behavior and cosponsorship decisions in the 105th–112th Houses, we find no evidence that office proximity affects patterns of legislative behavior. These results contrast with decades of congressional scholarship and recent empirical studies. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of accounting for selection processes and omitted variables in estimating the causal impact of networks.

Electoral Studies, 2008

Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. While there has been som... more Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. While there has been some research focused on who votes by absentee ballot, little research has considered another important question about absentee voting: Which absentee ballots are counted and which are not? Research following the 2000 presidential election has studied the problem of uncounted ballots for precinct voters but not for absentee voters. Using data from Los Angeles County -the nation's largest and most diverse voting jurisdiction -for the November 2002 general election, we test a series of hypothesis that certain types of ballots and voters have a higher likelihood that their ballots will be counted. We find that uniform service personnel, overseas civilians, voters who request non-English ballots and permanent absentee voters have a much lower likelihood of returning their ballot, and once returned, a lower likelihood that their ballots will be counted compared with the general absentee voting population. We conclude our paper with a discussion of the implications of our research for the current debates about absentee voting.

Election Law Journal, 2006

... and Fowler (2006) shows that strong connections often exist between legislators that represen... more ... and Fowler (2006) shows that strong connections often exist between legislators that represent ge-ographically proximate constituencies. ... voting behavior. Discussion and Conclusion As Sen. Connie Mack III's (R-FL) career in the Senate drew to a close by the end of 2000, the ...

Interpersonal communication presents experimental researchers with a methodological challenge and... more Interpersonal communication presents experimental researchers with a methodological challenge and a research opportunity. The challenge is that communication between subjects blurs the line between treatment and control conditions. When treatments are transmitted from subject to subject, the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) is violated, and comparison of treatment and control outcomes may provide a biased assessment of the treatment's causal influence. Social scientists are increasingly interested in the substantive phenomena that lead to SUTVA violations, such as communication in advance of an election. Experimental designs that gauge SUTVA violations provide useful insights into the extent and influence of interpersonal communication. This paper illustrates the value of one such design, a multi-level experiment in which treatments are randomly assigned to individuals and varying proportions of their neighbors. After discussing the theoretical and statistical underpinnings of this design, we apply it to a large-scale voter mobilization experiment conducted in Chicago during a special election in 2009 using the social pressure mailings pioneered by Gerber, Green and Larimer (2008).

American Politics Research, 2011

New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. We apply a variety of statistical techniques, inc... more New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. We apply a variety of statistical techniques, including propensity score matching methods, to compare the mayoral turnout of registered voters across flood depths. We find that registered voters who experienced more than six feet of flooding were more likely to participate in the mayoral election than registered voters who experienced less flooding. We attribute this to their increased motivation to participate in municipal politics in conjunction with voter mobilization efforts in the wake of Katrina. Our finding about the characteristics of the voters who participated in the mayoral election given the flooding provides us insights into the scope of change for the political landscape of New Orleans after the hurricane.

American Politics Research, 2011

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to... more Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

American Journal of Political Science, 2012

ABSTRACT Interpersonal communication presents a methodological challenge and a research opportuni... more ABSTRACT Interpersonal communication presents a methodological challenge and a research opportunity for researchers involved in field experiments. The challenge is that communication among subjects blurs the line between treatment and control conditions. When treatment effects are transmitted from subject to subject, the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) is violated, and comparison of treatment and control outcomes may provide a biased assessment of the treatment’s causal influence. Social scientists are increasingly interested in the substantive phenomena that lead to SUTVA violations, such as communication in advance of an election. Experimental designs that gauge SUTVA violations provide useful insights into the extent and influence of interpersonal communication. This article illustrates the value of one such design, a multilevel experiment in which treatments are randomly assigned to individuals and varying proportions of their neighbors. After describing the theoretical and statistical underpinnings of this design, we apply it to a large‐scale voter‐mobilization experiment conducted in Chicago during a special election in 2009 using social‐pressure mailings that highlight individual electoral participation. We find some evidence of within‐household spillovers but no evidence of spillovers across households. We conclude by discussing how multilevel designs might be employed in other substantive domains, such as the study of deterrence and policy diffusion.

Since the creation of the Internet, there has been a seemingly never-ending number of books and a... more Since the creation of the Internet, there has been a seemingly never-ending number of books and analyses about the role of the Internet in politics. Many of these books fail to keep in mind that the behavior of elites—the well-educated and politically active individuals who often represent the peer group of these authors—is not generally representative of the behavior of

California Journal of Politics and Policy, 2015

After California's adoption of the top two primary, voters faced the possibility of ballot choice... more After California's adoption of the top two primary, voters faced the possibility of ballot choices between co-partisan candidates (two Democrats, for example, or two Republicans). We use the publicly available Google Trends data, which provides the rate of searching for particular words, to evaluate whether Californians are more likely to search for the names of legislators who faced co-partisan challengers in their general election than to search for the names of legislators who faced opposite-partisan challengers in the general election. We find evidence of increased search for the general election and, moreover, find that there is no increase for the primary election, suggesting that when the typical voter loses a key electoral cue (the party label) the voter will rely upon other sources of information to make a voting decision.

Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, 2009

PS: Political Science & Politics, 2014