Michael Bailey

Michael Bailey
Georgetown University | GU · Government and McCourt School of Public Policy

About

39
Publications
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1,556
Citations

Publications

Publications (39)
Article
Full-text available
Court scholars have a voracious appetite for Supreme Court preference measures. Several articles question whether widely used Martin and Quinn (2002, 2011) scores provide valid intertemporal measures, calling into question virtually an entire generation of quantitative research on the Court. This article discusses the challenges of intertemporal pr...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding how the Tea Party has affected congressional elections and roll call voting helps us understand not only an important political movement, but how movements affect politics more generally. We investigate four channels for the movement to influence political outcomes: activists, constituent opinion, group endorsement activity and elite-...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding if and how campaign contributions affect policy is important for many policy and normative debates. The competing perspectives on this issue differ fundamen-tally with regard to money and policy as the wealth bias perspective implies money dis-torts policy to favor the wealthy, the minimal effects perspective implies no effects and th...
Chapter
This chapter articulates the challenges that any empirically oriented scholar would have in devising a measure of judicial preferences. It shows that it is impossible to make robust across-time comparisons using only Court voting. However, if we incorporate additional data we can create a measure of ideology that meets our needs and has face validi...
Chapter
This concluding chapter first summarizes the book's key themes. These are that justices are influenced by more than just the policy preferences emphasized by the attitudinal model; the law matters for justices; and the influence of specific legal doctrines varies across justices. These findings have important implications for understanding the poli...
Chapter
Justices have considerable latitude to pursue either their personal preferences or their personal visions of the law. The danger is that the Court gets so far out of line from the rest of the political system that we see fundamental institutional showdowns that threaten the independence of the judiciary, such as the Court-packing controversy in the...
Chapter
This chapter provides general answers to questions about executive influence on the Court, which will help us to understand decision-making on the Court—what matters and when. It considers whether the Court is beyond democratic control. If the solicitor general's briefs influence justices, this could provide at least some measure of democratically...
Book
How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors? This book combines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court. The book shows how two types...
Chapter
This chapter provides a theoretical framework for disentangling the political and legal perspectives on Court behavior. It shows that, indeed, the problem is knotty and how it is impossible to fully separate legal from policy-motivated behavior using only Supreme Court voting data. The knottiness of the problem is exacerbated by the fact that legal...
Chapter
This chapter discusses how historical context and personal experiences influence the legal values of justices, but the connections are imperfect and unpredictable. It argues that legal values are not independent of politics. As legal regimes evolve, so too do the patterns of legal values that justices hold. Adhering to these legal values may lead j...
Chapter
Building on the theoretical model of Chapter 3, this chapter seeks to assess whether “law” affects judicial decisions independently of policy preferences. Numerous legal doctrines may shape judicial decision-making, including stare decisis, originalism, plain meaning, the promotion of democratic participation, and doctrines with regard to specific...
Article
Full-text available
Since the Civil War, the president’s party has lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in all but three midterm election cycles. Many attribute this pattern to “balancing” by moderate voters who prefer a Democratic Congress when Republicans control the White House, and vice versa. Although a number of scholars have tested the balancing hypo...
Article
Many foreign policies central to American cold war efforts were politically difficult. Understanding the politics behind these policies is important for understanding the capacity of democracies to implement difficult but strategically important policies. I argue that we must recognize the important role of public opinion. When the public is unifie...
Article
Many observers of the US Supreme Court suspect that justices time their departures from the Court based on ideological and political factors. This paper assesses the theoretical effects of such behavior. Does political timing of retirement devalue the appointment process and thereby make the Court less responsive to the public? Do politically motiv...
Article
To understand and assess the impact that the law has on judicial decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court, one must disentangle the effects of law and policy preferences. In this paper, we elaborate the fundamental character of this challenge, and then present a novel approach to measuring the effect - if any - of the law on justices' decisions. K...
Article
Full-text available
Do legal factors or policy preferences account for judicial decisions making? This is one of the most important questions faced by students of the Supreme Court. Assessing whether justices' behavior is best explained by their policy preferences or by the law has been hindered by the difficulty of disentangling these two factors. In this paper, we u...
Article
Empirically oriented scholars often struggle with how to measure preferences across time and institutional contexts. This article characterizes these difficulties and provides a measurement approach that incorporates information that bridges time and institutions in a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach to ideal point measurement. The result...
Article
Full-text available
Whether states keep welfare benefits low in order to prevent in-migration of benefit-seeking individuals is one of the great questions in the study of federalism. Assessing this question is challenging, however, because it is difficult to specify exactly what constitutes evidence that states inhibit their spending for this reason. This article deve...
Article
In the paper, we explore the extent to which Supreme Court justices are constrained by legislative and executive preferences. We hypothesize and demonstrate that justices' compliance with executive and legislative preferences depends upon preference alignment between the branches, institutional structures that limit congressional action, and the sa...
Article
Full-text available
Difficulty in comparing preferences across time and institutional contexts hin-ders the empirical testing of many important theories in political science. In this paper, I characterize these difficulties and provide a measurement approach that relies on inter-temporal and inter-institutional "bridge" observations and Bayesian Markov chain simulatio...
Article
Full-text available
Whether poor single mothers move in response to welfare benefits has important implications for social policy in a federal system. Many scholars claim that welfare does not affect migration. These claims are not definitive, however, because the models underlying them rely on problematic assumptions and do not adequately control for nonwelfare deter...
Article
Full-text available
Conventional explanations of the solicitor general's influence on the Supreme Court emphasize his expertise or experience. We articulate and test a more political account based on insights from signaling theory. We argue justices will be more receptive to signals from the solicitor general (S.G.) when either the justice and S.G. are ideologically p...
Article
Does interstate competition reduce welfare generosity? Most analyses of this question focus on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefit levels. The welfare-reducing logic of interstate competition should apply to all redistributive programs, however. We test for competitive effects more generally, examining several measures of welfare...
Article
Full-text available
How does competition affect higher education? This paper explores this question for public and private universities. Theory indicates that competition can push higher education policy in one of two different directions. On the one hand, competition may increase spending. For states, this would occur if states treat higher education as “developmenta...
Article
The conventional view of private campaign contributions is that they distort policy to the detriment of society. Formal models consistent with such views, however, are based on restrictive assumptions about the nature of campaigns, interest groups and policy dimensionality. This paper relaxes those assumptions and allows for informative campaigns,...
Article
Full-text available
Although the ability of presidents to mobilize opinion on foreign policy issues is well documented, much less is known about presidents’ abilities to change public attitudes on social and moral issues. We explore the limits of presidential persuasiveness by examining President Clinton’s 1993 proposal to permit gay men and lesbian women to serve ope...
Article
Full-text available
A major challenge in testing spatial, interinstitutional models is placing different sets of actors on a common preference scale. We address this challenge by presenting a random effects, panel probit method which we use to estimate the ideal points of presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices on one scale. These estimates are comparable acr...
Article
Full-text available
Many conventional ideal point estimation techniques are inappropriate when only a limited number of votes are available. This paper presents a covariate-based random-effects Bayesian approach that allows scholars to estimate ideal points based on fewer votes than required for fixed-effects models. Using covariates brings more information to bear on...
Article
A core tenet of many approaches to American trade politics is that diffuse interests exert little or no influence on the process. This paper argues, however, that there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that diffuse interests can and do influence congressional trade politics. Members of Congress respond to these interests in order to...
Article
Theory: Constituent pressures on senators vary by party and heterogeneity of state. Studies of representation based on analysis of roll call voting which fail to take these factors into account will underestimate constituency influence and overemphasize the impact of party and interest group ratings. Hypotheses: (1) The greater the heterogeneity of...
Article
Full-text available
The 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) changed the structure of the making of U.S. trade policy and made possible a dramatic reduction in tariffs. The authors demonstrate that the key institutional innovation in the RTAA was its mandate to lower tariffs through reciprocal agreements with foreign nations. The expansion of exports under the...
Article
Full-text available
While a great deal of research exists on the "race to the bottom" (RTB) in welfare, this paper argues that very little work has directly tested the core predic- tions of RTB theory. Part of the problem is theoretical ambiguity, something this paper addresses with a formal model of state welfare policymaking that incorpo- rates individual and state...
Article
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