Matthew P. Hitt

Colorado State University | CSU · Department of Political Science

Changes to the media environment have increased polarized voting in America through both addition and subtraction. We argue that the decline of local newspapers has contributed to the nationalization of American politics: as local newspapers close, Americans rely more heavily on available national news or partisan heuristics to make political decis...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Despite the Supreme Court’s lack of direct electoral accountability, voters may factor its outputs into their voting decisions because elected representatives can affect the Court’s powers and composition. In this paper, we uncover an ironic predicament that faces candidates running on reforming this institution. Citizens who possess higher levels...

While Prospect Theory helps to explain decision-making under risk, studies often base frames on hypothetical events and fail to acknowledge that many individuals lack the ability and motivation to engage in complex thinking. We use an original survey of US adults (N = 2813) to test Prospect Theory in the context of the May 2023 debt ceiling negotia...

Despite the vast literature on Prospect Theory, few studies use frames based on actual events or account for individuals whose previous losses moderate decision making under uncertainty. We use data from two original surveys on US adults to test whether framing effects hold in the context of the 2023 debt ceiling and government shutdown debates. We...

While Prospect Theory helps to explain decision-making under risk, studies often base frames on hypothetical events and fail to acknowledge that many individuals lack the ability and motivation to engage in complex thinking. We use an original survey of US adults (N = 2813) to test Prospect Theory in the context of the May 2023 debt ceiling negotia...

While Prospect Theory remains a leading explanation for decision making under risk, most extant literature use hypothetical scenarios and fail to acknowledge that many individuals lack numerical ability. We use an original survey of US adults (N = 2,813) to test the assumptions of Prospect Theory and the role of numeracy in the context of the May 2...

A rich literature argues that the perceived legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court is stable and once resisted the polarizing forces of partisan politics. However, political developments over the last several years raise the possibility that Democrats and Republicans now view the Court’s place in democracy differently. We analyze an original dataset...

Despite sporadic claims that elections may serve as a referendum on the Supreme Court, prevailing theories of diffuse support imply that voters mostly ignore the Court. This paper tests that thesis. Using recent, nationally-representative survey data, Study 1 shows that, despite the Supreme Court being ranked as a middling issue of importance, high...

Local newspapers can hold back the rising tide of political division in America by turning away from the partisan battles in Washington and focusing their opinion page on local issues. When a local newspaper in California dropped national politics from its opinion page, the resulting space filled with local writers and issues. We use a pre-register...

Data sets in the form of binary matrices are ubiquitous across scientific domains, and researchers are often interested in identifying and quantifying noteworthy structure. One approach is to compare the observed data to that which might be obtained under a null model. Here we consider sampling from the space of binary matrices which satisfy a set...

The Rocky Mountain Scholars Program (RMSP) was developed, in part, to improve student success and persistence in Engineering disciplines at Colorado State Universi-ty through a portfolio of engagement activities focused around undergraduate research experiences. Female RMSP participants exhibited substantially higher retention rates and grade point...

The United States Supreme Court exists to resolve constitutional disputes between the lower courts and the other branches of government, allowing elected officials, citizens, and businesses to act without legal uncertainty. American law and society function more effectively when the Court resolves these ambiguous questions of Constitutional law. Si...

A rapidly burgeoning literature in judicial politics concerns the variation in elements of writing style such as reading difficulty, cognitive complexity, affective language, and informality in judicial opinions. Some of these studies argue that judges strategically alter their writing style in anticipation of reactions from other actors. Others in...

We seek to measure the impact of decisions issued by the US Supreme Court on public awareness of its cases. We use a quasi-experimental design with the Court decisions as the stimulus of hypothesized public awareness change. We find that public awareness of cases varies according to individual differences: more educated, knowledgeable, and informat...

An argument of those supporting the direct election of regulators is that election allows voter preferences to be translated easily into policy outcomes. However, a danger of this approach is that the low salience of regulatory issues among the median voter could allow for regulatory capture, where regulated firms use their influence to extract fav...

When citizens believe the U.S. Supreme Court makes decisions in an insincere or politicized manner, their specific support for the institution can decline. The Court’s relative aversion to publicity means the media are the primary source of information about its decisions. We design a survey experiment that varies the type of coverage—game frame or...

Spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem to the inclusion of institutional considerations such as committees, political parties, and various voting and amendment rules. Such models, however, implicitly assume that no policy is better than another at solving public policy problems and that all policy makers are equal...

Identifying the U.S. Supreme Court's most influential precedents is integral to understanding its impact on society. To make these identifications, scholars often analyze the network of citations in Supreme Court opinions. I contend that the broader jurisprudential significance of precedent can be better captured by considering how frequently a pre...

When, how, and under what conditions can individual legislators affect presidential appointments? Since the early 1900s, the senatorial norm of the blue slip has played a key role in the confirmation process of federal district and appeals court judges, and it is an important aspect of the individual prerogative that characterizes senatorial behavi...

Numeric political appeals represent a prevalent but overlooked domain of public opinion research. When can quantitative information change political attitudes, and is this change trumped by partisan effects? We analyze how numeracy—or individual differences in citizens’ ability to process and apply numeric policy information—moderates the effective...

Time-series, or longitudinal, data are ubiquitous in the social sciences. Unfortunately, analysts often treat the time-series properties of their data as a nuisance rather than a substantively meaningful dynamic process to be modeled and interpreted. Time-Series Analysis for Social Sciences provides accessible, up-to-date instruction and examples o...

Spatial models of Supreme Court appointments assume that the president knows the preferences of nominees and is constrained only by the ideology of the Senate. However, nominees vary in the amount of available information that can be used to determine their preferences. I find that justices who offered more information in the form of relevant profe...

Interest groups often make their preferences known on cases before the U.S. Supreme Court via amicus curiae briefs. In evaluating the case and related arguments, we posit that judges take into account more than just the number of supporters for the liberal and conservative positions. Specifically, judges’ decisions may also reflect the relative pow...

Theories of political institutions often make causal predictions, but the correlative tools political scientists typically use offer severely limited tests of these predictions. We adapt the tools of causal inference to study the effects of institutional rules on legislative behavior and to shed light on what it is that party leaders in the US Cong...

We take advantage of a rare shift in institutional rules to provide unambiguous evidence of causal effects of party influence in Congress. After the 1994 Republican Revolution, the new majority party in the US House adopted rules that centralized committee as-signments within the party leadership. We build a research design around this event to stu...