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Abstract:
Although central to understanding the role of the media, few quantitative measures of the political positions of media exist. Collecting and classifying editorials adopted by 23 major U.S. newspapers on 495 Supreme Court cases from 1994-2004, we apply an item response theoretic approach to place newspapers on a substantively meaningful - and long validated - scale of political preferences. Our results provide significant insights into the study of the media. We show that 17 of the 23 papers are more likely to the left of the median Justice for this period, but also find considerable evidence that this may be an artifact of the liberalness of urban, elite, high circulation papers.

media bias, item response theory, ideal points, bayesian, measurement, supreme court

Abstract:
One of the central predicates of legal regulation of media ownership is that ownership consolidation reduces substantive viewpoint diversity. Appellate courts and in turn the Federal Communications Commission have increasingly demanded evidence for this convergence hypothesis, but extant empirical measures of viewpoint diversity sidestep the problem, ignoring diversity, viewpoints, or both. Our article develops and offers a finely-tuned, time-varying statistical measure of editorial viewpoint diversity, based on a new database of over 1600 editorials in 25 top papers from 1988-2004. Using this new measure, we assess the validity of the convergence hypothesis by examining the evolution of editorial viewpoints over the course of five major mergers and acquisitions. Our data reveals complex patterns that defy extant accounts, showing stability, convergence and divergence of viewpoints in the face of - and depending on the circumstances of - consolidation. These findings fundamentally challenge extant empirical regulatory assumptions - pointing to the crucial role of editorial policies - and deeply inform the viability of the ownership regulations and the interpretation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

viewpoint diversity, media, consolidation, item response theory

Abstract:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's court-packing plan of 1937 and the "switch in time that saved nine" animate central questions of law, politics, and history. Did Supreme Court Justice Roberts abruptly switch votes in 1937 to avert a showdown with Roosevelt? Scholars disagree vigorously about whether Roberts's transformation was gradual and anticipated or abrupt and unexpected. Using newly collected data of votes from 1931-1940 terms, we contribute to the historical understanding of this episode by providing the first quantitative evidence of Roberts's transformation. Applying modern measurement methods, we show that Roberts shifted sharply to the left in the 1936 term. The shift appears sudden and temporary. The duration of Roberts's shift, however, is in many ways irrelevant, as the long-term transformation of the Court is overwhelmingly attributable to Roosevelt's appointees.

Abstract:
Despite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a necessary part of many areas of quantitative inference, including in United States voting rights litigation. Ecological inference suffers from a lack of identification that, most agree, is best addressed by incorporating individual-level data into the model. In this paper, we test the limits of such an incorporation by attempting it in the context of drawing inferences about racial voting patterns using a combination of an exit poll and precinct-level ecological data; accurate information about racial voting patterns is needed to trigger voting rights laws that can determine the composition of United States legislative bodies. Specifically, we extend and study a hybrid model that addresses two-way tables of arbitrary dimension. We apply the hybrid model to an exit poll we administered in the City of Boston in 2008. Using the resulting data as well as simulation, we compare the performance of a pure ecological estimator, pure survey estimators using various sampling schemes, and our hybrid. We conclude that the hybrid estimator offers substantial benefits by enabling substantive inferences about voting patterns not practicably available without its use.

racial bloc voting, ecological inference, Bayesian inference

Abstract:
Entries in the burgeoning “text-as-data” movement are often accompanied by lists or visualizations of how word (or other lexical feature) usage differs across some pair or set of documents. These are intended either to establish some target semantic concept (like the content of partisan frames) to estimate word-specific measures that feed forward into another analysis (like locating parties in ideological space) or both. We discuss a variety of techniques for selecting words that capture partisan, or other, differences in political speech and for evaluating the relative importance of those words. We introduce and emphasize several new approaches based on Bayesian shrinkage and regularization. We illustrate the relative utility of these approaches with analyses of partisan, gender, and distributive speech in the U.S. Senate.

Abstract:
The foundation upon which accounts of policy-motivated behavior of Supreme Court justices are built consists of assumptions about the policy preferences of the justices. To date, most scholars have assumed that the policy positions of Supreme Court justices remain consistent throughout the course of their careers and most measures of judicial ideology-such as Segal and Cover scores-are time invariant. On its face, this assumption is reasonable; Supreme Court justices serve with life tenure and are typically appointed after serving in other political or judicial roles. However, it is also possible that the worldviews, and thus the policy positions, of justices evolve through the course of their careers. In this article we use a Bayesian dynamic ideal point model to investigate preference change on the US Supreme Court. The model allows for justices' ideal points to change over time in a smooth fashion. We focus our attention on the 16 justices who served for 10 or more terms and completed their service between the 1937 and 2003 terms. The results are striking-14 of these 16 justices exhibit significant preference change. This has profound implications for the use of time-invariant preference measures in applied work.