Jason Seawright’s research while affiliated with Northwestern University and other places

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Publications (58)


The wealthy as a barrier to tax reform
  • Article

August 2023

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40 Reads

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1 Citation

Oxford Review of Economic Policy

Benjamin I Page

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Jason Seawright

In the optimal design of tax reform proposals, and in decisions about when and how to recommend them, it is useful to take explicit account of issues of political feasibility. In the United States—and probably around the world—important political barriers work against the enactment of major progressive tax reforms. A close look at US poll and survey data indicates that opposition by the general public is not a significant barrier: large majorities favour progressive taxation in general and favour a number of specific progressive tax changes, including higher top personal income tax rates; higher taxes on corporations; increased taxation of realized capital gains; and taxation of unrealized gains at death. But there exist other serious political barriers against tax reform, including an institutional status quo bias that makes any major policy change (especially any progressive change) very difficult; and strong political opposition from business corporations and wealthy individuals. The best available evidence indicates that nearly all US business firms, and most multi-millionaires and billionaires, oppose practically any sort of progressive tax reform. The best evidence also indicates that these firms and individuals exercise far more influence on policy-making than ordinary citizens do. We mention some possible strategies for dealing with this problem.


Finding Your Social Science Project: The Research Sandbox

October 2022

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75 Reads

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5 Citations

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


6 - Case Selection

October 2022

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8 Reads

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


5 - Heuristics

October 2022

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5 Reads

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


2 - Current Practices

October 2022

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8 Reads

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


8 - Theoretical Frameworks

October 2022

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46 Reads

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


11 - From Exploration to Appraisal

October 2022

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5 Reads

Chapter 11 concludes our study with a close look at the transition from exploration to testing. First, we discuss various steps involved in vetting a research project. This includes a calculation of costs, payoffs, and risks; a consideration of research ethics; and extensive market-testing. In the second section, we discuss when to go public with preliminary ideas and findings. In the third section, we consider what to reveal about the research process. Finally, we discuss the contrast between exploratory to confirmatory research.


4 - Strategies

October 2022

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3 Reads

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


10 - Tools and Tips for Theorizing

October 2022

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20 Reads

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


References

October 2022

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55 Reads

The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.


Citations (26)


... Access to a debate mechanism can help resolve a dispute, but this is not a guarantee of justice. Such a mysterious concept as justice (fairness) cannot exist in this world, but it can be in another" [1]. ...

Reference:

Growth of the Role of Judicial Branch of Power, How a Response to Time Requirements
Reshaping State and Local Politics
  • Citing Article
  • December 2018

... El mecanismo causal de esta propuesta sigue la lógica de un mecanismo dentro del "flujo causal" (Gerring, 2022, p. 239) de la escuela de Columbia, en la que el impacto --probabilístico, no determinista-de los factores socioeconómicos en las preferencias electorales está moderado por la dinámica local de competencia partidista particular de cada municipio -en su dimensión de fragmentación electoral (Figura 1). De esta forma, la relación causal derivada del esquema del voto sociológico entre factores estructurales y el éxito electoral de MORENA observada a nivel agregado en los municipios de la ZMVM ocurre de manera diferenciada por su interacción con la dinámica local de competencia electoral de cada uno de los municipios. ...

Finding Your Social Science Project: The Research Sandbox
  • Citing Book
  • October 2022

... It allows us to be sensitive to mechanistic understandings of causality by uncovering the motives, perceptions, and meanings behind the political choices of those affected by the outbreak. Second, our case selection procedure incorporates the key features of the DID's dynamic potential outcome causal framework, unlike static frameworks based on linear regression or matching (Galvin and Seawright 2021;Seawright 2016b). ...

Surprising Causes: Propensity-adjusted Treatment Scores for Multimethod Case Selection
  • Citing Article
  • May 2021

Sociological Methods & Research

... The goal of this section is to investigate whether the Capacity measure behaves in the expected manner, and whether it will be useful for investigating theoretical questions regarding state capacity. Following guidance from Adcock and Collier (2001), Seawright and Collier (2014) and McMann et al. (Forthcoming), we examine the new measure in terms of its face validity, content validity, convergent validity, and nomological validity. Figure 1 displays the mean and standard deviation of each country's Capacity posterior distribution in the year 2015, ranked from the highest to the lowest. ...

Rival strategies of validation: tools or evaluating measures of democracy
  • Citing Article
  • April 2015

Revista Debates

... Or has it? The dominant narrative among social scientists still maintains that companies' occasional activism on liberal social causes and bipartisan donation behavior are something of a mirage, masking a persistent alignment with the Republican Party (see Hersh (2023), Grumbach and Pierson (2019), Cohen et al. (2019), Page et al. (2018)). Recent studies of CEOs of major publicly-traded companies suggest they are predominantly Republican, whether measured by their party registration (Fos et al. 2022) or by their campaign contributions (Cohen et al. 2019). ...

Billionaires and Stealth Politics
  • Citing Book
  • January 2018

... In his "The design of experiments" (Fisher 1935) Fisher discussed that "different tests of significance are appropriate to test different features of the same null hypothesis". This idea of using several statistical tests within a single statistical problem is very powerful in practice and has many applications, like testing elaborate theories in social and medical studies (Caughey et al. 2017). ...

Nonparametric Combination (NPC): A Framework for Testing Elaborate Theories
  • Citing Article
  • January 2017

The Journal of Politics

... In a second step, the authors qualitatively examined all of the monologues included in the dataset, considering the context in which they were initially broadcast. Following methodological guidance on deviant case selection (Gerring 2004;Levy 2008;Seawright 2016aSeawright , 2016b, the most egregious affective shift was chosen: Stephen Colbert's live monologue after the Capitol riot (Colbert 2021). Recent research suggests that increasingly, political comedy feels the need to react to critical moments with immediacy (Gehrke 2024), thus analysing the LIVE-broadcast of Colbert's programme adds additional relevance to our case study. ...

The Case for Selecting Cases That Are Deviant or Extreme on the Independent Variable
  • Citing Article
  • April 2016

Sociological Methods & Research

... This method captures the actual change in affect; that is, it allows residual levels of affect in the following week to represent deviations of the actual next-week affect values from those values expected based on levels of affect in the current week (Rogosa et al., 1982). Consistent with the method of concept formation in social sciences (Collier et al., 2008;Borrás & Laatsit, 2019), in this research we study the concept "affective shift" as PA and NA change in tandem, and treated the Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics and intercorrelations among the focal variables. Table 2 shows the CFA results. ...

Typologies: Forming Concepts and Creating Categorical Variables
  • Citing Article
  • Full-text available
  • January 2008

... 29 The recommended number of cases for the QCA method ranges from 10 to 60, and thus our selection of 31 cases is appropriate to preclude any "limited diversity" that may arise from a smaller sample size. 30,31 These cases include both core hospital leaders with high-level transformational leadership and those with low-level transformational leadership so that the cases are representative for exploring the configurations affecting the formation of high-level transformational leadership among core hospital leaders. ...

Comment: Limited Diversity and the Unreliability of QCA
  • Citing Article
  • September 2014

Sociological Methodology

... Existing research on the effects of candidate selection modes on descriptive representation offers mixed results (Dhima et al. 2021;Golder et al. 2017;Kerevel et al. 2019;Roberts et al. 2013). Exclusive candidate selection by committee has been shown to be more effective than open primaries in recruiting successful non-white candidates for the Conservatives in the UK (Sobolewska 2013). ...

Do Electoral Laws Affect Women's Representation?
  • Citing Article
  • November 2012

Comparative Political Studies