Tennesseans strongly support charter schools while their feelings about school vouchers are more divided, according to a new poll from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.

“A solid 66 percent of those polled support charter schools,” said John Geer, co-director of the center. Thirty-five percent support a limited voucher program for low-income families in poor-performance schools, while 31 percent favor vouchers without such restrictions. Twenty-six percent oppose all school vouchers.

• Download the May 2013 Vanderbilt Poll Executive Summary
• Download a one-page poll fact sheet

Economic status likewise influenced how many Tennesseans felt about the use of college scholarship money derived from the sale of state lottery tickets.

Sixty-four percent of those surveyed approved of lottery scholarship money going to “students from low-income and middle-income families who maintain a certain GPA,” Geer said.

The current practice allows lottery scholarships for any student who maintains the set grade-point average, regardless of need. Thirty-four percent of those polled were in favor of maintaining that criteria.

Those are just some of the intriguing results of the Vanderbilt Poll conducted May 6-13 by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The poll, conducted via landline and cell phone interviews by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, was taken of 813 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Popularity of politicians

State officials continue to get good news from the Vanderbilt Poll, with Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander enjoying solid popularity, and Gov. Bill Haslam with a 63 percent approval rating. The Tennessee General Assembly earns a narrow 51 percent approval rating, divided along party lines.

Nationally, President Obama’s approval rating in the state has dipped to 40 percent from the 45 percent rating he had six months ago. The U.S. Congress remains very unpopular in Tennessee with a 21 percent rating, largely unchanged since November 2011.

Health care

Echoing the results of the Vanderbilt Poll from December 2012, Tennesseans remain convinced that Tennessee officials – not the federal government – should create and run the health care exchanges mandated by the federal Affordable Health Care Act. Haslam has announced that the state will not create or run the exchanges.

Of registered voters in Tennessee, 46 percent prefer that state officials create and run the exchanges on their own, while 41 percent prefer to use a system created by the federal government. In December, those percentages were 52 percent and 35 percent, respectively.

One health care issue that voters have shifted on significantly is whether the state should accept federal support to expand Medicaid to cover low-income individuals who currently lack health insurance. In December, 47 percent of registered voters supported accepting these funds. Currently, 63 percent oppose the decision that was made not to expand Medicaid. Opinions on that issue stick close to party lines, with Democrats and Independents supporting Medicaid expansion and Republicans and Tea Party members opposing it.

The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt aims to foster an engaging intellectual environment to explore how political institutions shape political debate, ameliorate conflicts and influence public police. It is co-directed by John Geer, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science, and Josh Clinton, associate professor of political science.

More poll results and information are available at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions website.

“It may indeed be time to embark on the process that will give us the ‘Next Great Copyright Act,’ as was done three times in the past (Copyright Acts of 1790, 1909 and 1976),” said Daniel Gervais, director of the Vanderbilt Intellectual Property Program at Vanderbilt Law School, in prepared testimony.

“So much has happened since 1976 when personal computers, the Internet, the digitization of music and the phenomenon of social media were not yet realities.”

Gervais testified before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives.

Daniel Gervais (Vanderbilt Law School)

“America is at its best when it produces and exports intellectual property,” Gervais testified. “As the transition to the digital realm continues, it is absolutely essential to get copyright policy right.”

Copyright should allow professional creators to get a fair return on their creative investment when their work is successful in the marketplace, in Gervais’ view.

“It should also allow many sustainable business models to flourish in producing, exporting and providing access to U.S. copyrighted material around the world,” he said.

It is urgent for the United States to be a leader in discussions about global copyright, which has come to look more like a patchwork of rules than a coordinated strategy of laws, Gervais said.

The full version of Gervais’ prepared testimony will be posted at Gervais’ website.

M. Eric Johnson (Dartmouth)

M. Eric Johnson, a former associate professor at Vanderbilt University and current associate dean at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, will return to Nashville as the dean of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

Johnson, responsible for seven research centers and initiatives at Dartmouth as well as its top-rated MBA program, begins work at Owen July 1, pending approval by the Vanderbilt Board of Trust.

“The return of Eric Johnson to Vanderbilt marks the start of an exciting new era at the Owen Graduate School of Management,” said Provost Richard McCarty. “Eric is one of the leading scholars of supply chains and the impact of information technology on corporations. He is also a proven leader whose record of accomplishments at Dartmouth is enviable by any measure.

“We welcome Eric and his family with great enthusiasm, and we are excited for what he’ll bring to the future of Owen.”

Johnson called the Owen school “a true gem among the world’s best business schools.”

“I am honored to be given the opportunity to lead the school to even higher achievement,” he said

Johnson earned bachelor’s degrees in industrial engineering and economics from Pennsylvania State University along with a master’s in industrial engineering and operations research. He went on to Stanford University for a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and engineering management.

Johnson’s teaching and research focus on the impact of information technology on the extended enterprise. His latest book, The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft, examines the security failures and economic incentives that drive identity theft. He holds patents on interface design and has testified before Congress on information security.

“Among an extraordinary group of candidates, Eric stood out,” said Chris Guthrie, dean of Vanderbilt Law School and head of the search committee that selected Johnson. “His hiring is a coup for Vanderbilt and a testament to the strength, vitality and reputation of the Owen School, the university and Nashville.”

Johnson previously spent eight years (1991-99) at Owen, the last three as a tenured associate professor of operations management. He twice won awards for teaching excellence.

In the private sector, Johnson has held positions with Corvette America, Inc., Packard Electric, Systems Modeling Corp. and Hewlett-Packard.

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Although the patronage system of political appointees shows no signs of weakening, anything that can be done to corral it would help the federal government operate more efficiently, say two Vanderbilt University researchers.

“Current presidents have between 3,000 and 4,000 positions at their disposal to fill throughout the federal government, which suggests that citizens should be concerned about how patronage appointments affect government performance,” said David Lewis, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.

“If the victors get the spoils, what do the citizens get?”

Using the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), a measuring system devised during the George W. Bush administration by the Office of Management and Budget, Lewis and Vanderbilt alumnus and former Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions affiliate Nick Gallo found that citizens get “lower quality management of federal government programs because of patronage.”

“Career managers perform better than appointees, and those appointees from the campaign perform the worst,” Lewis said.

On the positive side, presidents try to avoid placing patronage appointments in positions where a lot of damage can be done, such as managing key federal programs, Lewis and Gallo note.

“Presidents try to place patronage appointees in positions where they are qualified to perform their jobs, or at the very least, where they can cause relatively little harm,” Lewis said.

Many are appointed to ambassadorships, he said. “Many of those are arguably unqualified for those offices and sometimes they perform poorly, but they generally don’t materially harm America’s interests, broadly defined.”

David Lewis (Daniel Dubois/Vanderbilt)

“Of course, presidents are not always successful at placing patronage appointees in positions where they will have little influence,” Lewis said, “and the consequences can be dramatic as illustrated by the cases of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina or Iraq reconstruction.”

Short of doing away with patronage appointments, which seems impractical, there are ways to reduce the harmful effects of the system, Lewis concludes.

“The United States does have significantly more political appointees than other developed countries, so there is definitely an argument to be made for scaling back those numbers,” Lewis said. “Failing that, being careful to place appointees and careerists on the same team in the right mix so each can leverage their skills working together can actually be a good thing for government performance.”

The paper was published in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. The full study can be accessed at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions website.

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The battle for work-life balance among female white collar employees, especially those with children, is something women have struggled with for decades. Though past studies have found little evidence that women are opting out of the workforce in general, first-of-its-kind research by Vanderbilt 2012/13 FedEx Research Professor, professor of law and economics and of management Joni Hersch shows that female graduates of elite undergraduate universities are working much fewer hours than their counterparts from less selective institutions.

“Even though elite graduates are more likely to earn advanced degrees, marry at later ages and have higher expected earnings, they are still opting out of full-time work at much higher rates than other graduates, especially if they have children,” said Hersch.

Hersch’s research finds that 60 percent of female graduates from elite colleges are working full time compared to 68 percent of women from other schools.

It’s all about the kids

The presence of children strongly influences how much a woman works. Labor market activity is lower for women with children, but the gap between those women with and without children is largest for elite graduates. Among elite graduates, married women without children are 20 percentage points more likely to be employed than their elite counterparts with children, while among non-elite graduates, the difference in the likelihood of employment is 13.5 percentage points.

MBA moms work least of all

Hersch found that when comparing graduates from elite and less selective schools, the largest gap in full-time labor market activity is among women who also earned a master’s in business degree.

“Married MBA mothers with a bachelor’s degree from the most selective schools are 30 percentage points less likely to be employed full time than are graduates of less selective schools,” said Hersch.

The full-time employment rate for MBA moms who earned bachelor’s degrees from a tier-one institution is 35 percent. In contrast, the full-time employment rate for those from a less-selective institution is 66 percent. The gap remains even after taking into account the selectivity of MBA institution, personal characteristics, current or prior occupation, undergraduate major, spouse’s characteristics, number and age of children, and family background.

Fewer female CEOs?

Joni Hersch, professor of law and economics, co-director, Ph.D. program in law and economics

Hersch contends these statistics show that the greater rate of opting out by MBA moms with undergraduate degrees from elite institutions has implications for women’s professional advancement.

“Elite workplaces, like Fortune 500 companies, prefer to hire graduates of elite colleges,” said Hersch. “Thus, lower labor market activity of MBAs from selective schools may have both a direct effect on the number of women reaching higher-level corporate positions as well as an indirect effect because a smaller share of women in top positions is associated with a smaller pipeline of women available to advance through the corporate hierarchy,” said Hersch.

Comparing degrees

Hersch found a similarly large gap among women who later earned a master’s in education. Sixty-six percent of tier-one graduates are employed full time compared to 82 percent of graduates from non-elite institutions.

Other factors also contribute to which women are working more hours.

“Estimates show greater labor activity among women with a bachelor’s degree in a field other than arts and humanities; those with graduate degrees; those in higher-level occupations such as management, science, education and legal; and women who are not white,” said Hersch.

Why opt out?

A common question associated with opting out is whether highly educated women are willingly choosing to exit the labor force to care for their children or whether they are “pushed out” by inflexible workplaces. But Hersch said this hypothesis of inflexible workplaces does not explain why labor market activity differs between graduates of elite and non-elite schools.

“Graduates of elite institutions are likely to have a greater range of workplace options as well as higher expected wages than graduates of less selective institutions, which would suggest that labor market activity would be higher among such women,” Hersch writes.

“Without discounting the well-known challenges of combining family and professional responsibilities, increasing workplace flexibility alone may have only a limited impact of reducing the gap between graduates of elite and non-elite schools.”

Gathering the data

Hersch gathered her data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, which provided detailed information for more than 100,000 college graduates. The survey was conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the National Science Foundation.

To identify schools considered elite and to put these schools into tier levels, Hersch used both the Carnegie Classifications of institutions of higher education and Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. Barron’s Profiles looks at quality indicators of each year’s entering class (SAT or ACT, high school GPA and high school class rank, and percent of applicants accepted). Barron’s then places colleges into seven categories: most competitive, highly competitive, very competitive, competitive, less competitive, noncompetitive, and special.

The Carnegie Classifications are based on factors such as the highest degree awarded; the number, type, and field diversity of post-baccalaureate degrees awarded annually; and federal research support. For example, Research universities offer a full range of baccalaureate programs through the doctorate, give high priority to research, award 50 or more doctoral degrees each year, and receive annually $40 million or more in federal support.

Hersch’s full working paper, titled “Opting Out among Women with Elite Education,” can be read here or accessed here.

A title loan store in Nashville, Tenn. (Joe Howell/Vanderbilt)

The standard knock against car title loans is a toothless assertion that the transaction leads to people losing their cars and then their jobs because they have no transportation to get to work, say three researchers led by Vanderbilt’s Paige Marta Skiba.

“Repossession affects few borrowers, and our evidence indicates that most borrowers will not lose their only way to work because of repossession,” said Skiba, associate professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School. “Thus, prohibitions on title loans based on the premise that borrowers are frequently losing their vehicles are misguided.”

Title loans are high-cost, short-term small loans secured by a vehicle that the borrower usually owns outright. Such loans, along with payday loans, are used by many people who are shut out from the mainstream banking system. The most common term for title loans is one month, and the interest rate is usually around 300 percent – when expressed as an annual percentage rate.

If the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the borrower’s vehicle.

Skiba, Vanderbilt economics Ph.D. student Kathryn Fritzdixon and Jim Hawkins, assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, surveyed 400 title loan customers in three states (Georgia, Idaho and Texas) in partnership with a title lending firm in November and December 2012. The three states have distinct approaches to regulating title loans, but enough similarities to allow meaningful comparisons.

Their study, Dude, Where’s My Car Title?: The Law, Behavior and Economics of Title Lending Markets, can be read at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2224247. It will be published this year in the University of Illinois Law Review.

Paige Marta Skiba (Vanderbilt Law School)

The study showed that less than 10 percent of vehicles involved in title loans ended up being repossessed. Moreover, less than 15 percent of borrowers said they had no other way to get to work if their car were repossessed.

“While not insignificant, this small percentage suggests that the dire consequences that critics predict are unlikely to occur for the vast majority of title borrowers,” Skiba said. “Rough calculations would place the percentage of title borrowers who lose their jobs as a result of title lending at 1.5 percent.”

Regulators could be of some help to title loan consumers, Skiba said. The research shows that most title loan customers are overly optimistic that they will pay back their loans on time, which means the loan ends up costing them much more than they believe it will when they first receive it.

“Policymakers should require that title lending companies post information about how people actually use title loans: information about the number of times people roll over their loan, the amount of money those rollovers cost in total, the number and amount of late fees and other fees people pay, and the likelihood of defaulting on the loan,” the study reads. “Research has demonstrated in real world markets that disclosure rules can be used to inform people about how others use the loans, which can change their expectations about their own use of the product.”

Chalmette, La., after being hit by Hurricane Katrina (Pattie Steib/iStock)

The best way to keep career federal civil servants from leaving for higher-paying private industry jobs is to provide them with opportunities to influence decisions in their agency, according to a study released by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.

Losing capable, experienced employees from federal service jobs can have serious consequences, said study authors David Lewis and Anthony Bertelli. Replacing them can be difficult when the jobs require prior experience working in the agency.

“For example, executive turnover in the Federal Emergency Management Agency definitely hurt the agency’s ability to respond to Hurricane Katrina,” Lewis said. “The agency suffered from low morale and persistent vacancies in top management positions prior to the disaster.”

The study, published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, was undertaken by Lewis, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt; and Bertelli, the C.C. Crawford Chair in Management and Performance at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development.

Using data collected from a web-based survey of nearly 2,400 appointed and career federal executives conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Center in 2007-2008, Lewis and Bertelli found that turnover among long-serving executives in federal agencies is usually the result of outside job opportunities and reduced influence over policy decisions.

“Career executives in the agencies where political appointees have the most influence are the most likely to leave,” Lewis said. “You do not work your entire career to get to the top positions just to be overruled repeatedly by political appointees who come in from outside the agency.” Other factors that influence career executives to leave are pay freezes and potential cuts in federal salaries.

“Appointed executives that want to keep long-serving careerists do have some flexibility in manipulating formal and informal rewards inside the agency,” Lewis said. “Public management is increasingly about responding effectively to the difficult management environment created by pay freezes and political battles in order to ensure effective administration of government.”

iStock

The wealthiest Americans are urgently concerned with reducing the national deficit and look favorably on cutting social programs such as Social Security to do so, according to a new study.

“Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans” was published in March in Perspective on Politics. It is co-authored by Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University, Benjamin Page and Jason Seawright, both of Northwestern.

“Most people suspect that the wealthy play a big role in American politics,” Bartels said. “Remarkably, though, we have never had any systematic evidence about their political preferences and behavior. This project begins to fill that gap.”

After an extensive screening process, the researchers identified 83 Chicago-area respondents willing to be surveyed who had an average wealth of $14 million, putting them in the top 1 percent of wealth-holders.

“Wealthy Americans are much less willing than others to provide broad educational opportunities, including ‘spend(ing) whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to’ or ‘mak(ing) sure that everyone who wants to go to college can do so,’” researchers found.

“They are less willing to pay taxes in order to provide health coverage for everyone, and they are much less supportive of tax-financed national health insurance. The wealthy tend to favor lower estate tax rates and to be less eager to increase income taxes on high-income people. … The wealthy oppose government action to redistribute income or wealth.”

A significant amount of wealthy Americans spend time engaging in political activity. The research showed that 99 percent of them voted in 2008 and 84 percent said they paid attention to politics most of the time. Two-thirds said they contributed to political campaigns, and they averaged $4,633 to candidates or organizations in the previous year. (An American National Election Study survey conducted after the 2008 presidential election found that 14 percent of the general population contributed to a candidate, party, or political action committee.)

Larry Bartels (Vanderbilt)

Twenty-one percent of wealthy respondents in the “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans” study solicited or “bundled” other peoples’ political contributions – something rarely if ever done by ordinary citizens. Wealthy respondents also reported personal contact with politicians unlikely to be enjoyed by voters of lesser means.

“The contemporary emphasis in Washington on reducing the federal budget deficit addresses what is, by far, the most important public problem in the minds of wealthy Americans – though not of the American public as a whole,” the report concludes.

“The willingness of many policymakers to cut popular social welfare programs, and their reluctance to increase taxes on people with high incomes, may be explained in part by the fact that social welfare programs are much less popular among wealthy people than among ordinary citizens.”

The investigators are seeking funding for a larger national study of the political views of the wealthy.

This week marks the 25^th anniversary of the gas attacks on the Kurdish village of Halabja, Iraq, at the hand of Saddam Hussein that killed at least 5,000 civilians. Vanderbilt University international criminal and humanitarian law expert Michael Newton says lessons learned from the Halabja attack could help the persecuted Kurds being attacked in Syria today.

Newton has worked closely with the Kurdish people for decades and helped establish the Iraqi Special Tribunal that convicted Hussein and led training in international criminal law for its judges, which he continues to do today.

He believes the legacy of the Halabja genocide, as well as the more than 50 other chemical weapons attacks against Kurdish villages and people, can be seen in the unified response of the United States and other Western countries to the reported preparations of the Syrian regime to use chemical weapons today.

Attack galvanized world attention

“The entire world learned that the costs of remaining silent are simply too ghastly to ignore.The ghosts of Halabja cry out to remind the world that as Kurds and other Syrians suffer under another repressive regime, the world must rally to their aid,” said Newton, professor of the practice of law at Vanderbilt Law School.

The United States and other countries did not immediately respond after the Halabja attack. But Newton said it “galvanized world attention on what was happening in Iraq and the terror of the Iraqi governmental regime under Saddam Hussein.”

Kurds essential to Hussein’s conviction

Newton said the Kurdish people were essential to Hussein’s conviction on war crimes because of the key evidence, witness statements and eyewitness testimony they risked their lives to gather. And this is what the Syrian Kurds must do today.

“It was the Kurds themselves that provided the record of the genocide; and I promise you, the Iraqi genocide cases could not have been prosecuted successfully without this evidence. And we must encourage the Syrian Kurds to do the same thing—to document with specificity the crimes being committed against them,” said Newton.

Mike Newton (Vanderbilt University/Daniel Dubois)

Along with helping to establish the Iraqi Special Tribunal that convicted Hussein and leading the training in international criminal law for its judges, Newton served in the Office of War Crimes Issues at the U.S. Department of State and was one of two U.S. delegates who negotiated the Elements of Crimes document for the International Criminal Court. He also coordinated the interface between the FBI and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and deployed into Kosovo to do forensics fieldwork to support the Milosevic indictment.

Newton is also the co-author of Enemy of the State: The Trial and Execution of Saddam Hussein.

Mural portrait of Hugo Chavez (iStock)

Public support for democracy in Venezuela remained among the highest in the Americas during the last year of President Hugo Chávez’s 14 years of power, according to a survey by the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University.

Chávez died March 5 in Caracas. A populist leader, his long tenure coincided with the collapse of the party system in Venezuela and with high levels of crime and corruption that have taken a toll on citizens’ sense of security.

Despite those factors, an AmericasBarometer poll of a nationally representative sample of 1,500 respondents taken in February and March 2012 found that Venezuelans supported democracy by an overwhelming 85.3 percent, placing them second only to Uruguay (66.5 percent). The United States trailed at 76.4 percent.

Support for Democracy, 2012 (LAPOP)

“In analyses we conducted of factors that predict support for democracy in Venezuela in 2012, we find that the only factors that help distinguish those Venezuelans who are more supportive of democracy from those who are less supportive … are age (older are more supportive than the young) and education (more education are more supportive than less educated), but beyond those two factors support for democracy is fairly evenly spread across the Venezuelan population,” wrote the authors of the report.

Average Support for Democracy Over Time in Venezuela (LAPOP)

The report was written by graduate student Frederico Batista Pereira; Mitchell Seligson, LAPOP founder and director and Centennial Professor of Political Science; and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, associate director of LAPOP and associate professor of political science.

LAPOP develops, implements and analyzes the AmericasBarometer public opinion surveys. Since the 1970s, LAPOP has gathered a treasure-trove of databases containing political perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean. LAPOP data and reports are available to interested researchers at the LAPOP website.

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Whether politicians and the press seem like friend or foe, elected officials regularly use news outlets to share and defend their views to the public. New research from Vanderbilt University finds certain media actually influenced the voting behavior of politicians.

Associate Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Joshua Clinton and former Vanderbilt graduate student Ted Enamorado studied the impact of the FOX News Channel on the voting behavior of members of Congress in the late 1990s. The researchers used a statistical method to analyze and compare the lawmakers’ voting behavior.

“We found the presence of FOX News in some districts caused those legislators whose constituents were exposed to FOX News to become more conservative and vote accordingly,” said Clinton. “This transformation occurred despite the fact that the average legislator in this sample was becoming slightly more liberal.”

Why FOX News Channel

The researchers chose to focus on the FOX News Channel for two key reasons:

• FOX News content is ideologically distinct from other broadcast news outlets. Such a distinction makes the effect of its expansion especially strong.

• The emergence of FOX News in certain congressional districts instead of others occurred in a manner unrelated to the voting behavior of elected officials and policy preferences of their districts. In other words, FOX was not introduced in only consistently conservative districts.

The researchers say the second point was crucial to their research design.

“Had the channel’s entry and expansion in certain geographic areas been linked to either of those factors, it would be difficult to disentangle the true effect of FOX News from pre-existing characteristics of either the legislators or their constituents,” said Clinton.

Research theory

The researchers’ theory was that FOX News Channel affected the behavior of elected officials by changing politicians’ incentives for taking certain policy stances.

Josh Clinton (Vanderbilt)

“Either politicians in districts that received FOX News anticipated and adjusted their voting behavior to match potential changes in their constituents’ ideological beliefs, or voters who received the conservative channel replaced incumbents with more right-leaning legislators,” said Clinton.

To test the first possibility, Clinton and Enamorado compared lawmakers’ votes in congressional sessions that took place in 1995-1996 versus those that occurred in 1997-1998. Their analysis clearly showed that FOX News’ presence resulted in a conservative shift for members of Congress, despite the fact that the average legislator in their sample was drifting slightly to the left.

Interestingly, they found that the bulk of the observed change occurred among Democrats. The effect of FOX News’ entry on Republican members was negligible.

“I think Democrats were sensitive to partisan conservative shifts among swing voters in their district because of the content of FOX News,” said Clinton.

Comparisons of members’ votes between 1997-1998 vs. 1999-2000 and 1995-1996 vs. 1999-2000 yielded similar results and demonstrate that the conservative shift observed in the initial comparison persisted across time.

Power at the polls?

Did this influence go so far as increasing a lawmaker’s chances of being kicked out of office? No. The researchers did not find any significant evidence that FOX News generated a replacement effect. The introduction of Fox News in a legislator’s district did not increase his or her chance of being kicked out of office by a more conservative candidate.

To establish this claim, the researchers identified districts in which incumbent legislators either retired or faced defeat in the Congress directly prior to the introduction of FOX News. They further analyzed the change in voting behavior of representatives in those districts before and after the channel’s creation, and ultimately found that exposure to the conservative news outlet did not significantly affect these differences in votes.

“Because members of Congress anticipated a shift in their constituents’ ideological preferences, they adjusted their views to avoid electoral punishment at the polls,” said Clinton.

Making the study fair

Before starting the study, the researchers wanted to ensure that they isolated the true effect of the conservative news outlet, so they did several tests:

• They compared the voting behavior of lawmakers whose districts received and did not receive FOX News. They found the voting behavior was statistically identical.

• They measured the political ideology of the district and the voting behavior of the lawmakers prior to the creation of FOX News to estimate the probability that a district was targeted to receive the conservative cable news channel. They found no statistically significant relationships between either of these variables, showing that when FOX News was created, it was not targeted to run in certain districts.

• They checked for potentially omitted factors by using the emergence of FOX News to predict prior changes in lawmakers’ voting behavior. They found no relationship between the voting behavior of members of Congress and the entry of FOX News in their districts at a later time.

As a whole, these tests provided evidence that the introduction of FOX News was not systematically assigned to certain congressional districts, which is a crucial preliminary finding necessary to ensure that the researchers isolate the true effect of the conservative news outlet.

Read the full study, titled “The Fox News Factor: How the Spread of Fox News Affects Position Taking in Congress.”

This story was written with the assistance of Vanderbilt graduate student Allison Archer.

Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos (Vanderbilt)

Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos spent Feb. 12 and 13 in Washington, D.C., meeting with congressional leaders and making the case for federal investments in science and engineering research and education. He also advocated for reforms to Medicare that recognize the important role of academic medical centers in training future health care providers and caring for our region’s sickest patients, regardless of their ability to pay.

The visit follows a joint op-ed Zeppos wrote with University of Tennessee President Joe DiPietro in November urging Congress to avoid the across-the-board cuts that would “hinder long-term economic growth, security and prosperity.”

Zeppos urged Congress to avert the impending across-the-board budget cuts and to address the critical fiscal challenges confronting the nation. He explained that the current state of budget uncertainty is extremely frustrating to university researchers whose work is in limbo as grants are delayed or cut and challenging to university administrators who must make long-term budget plans. While lawmakers were sympathetic and largely understanding of the important role federally supported research plays in the nation’s  economic growth and national security, the consensus was that cuts are likely to occur over the coming months.

Lawmakers also were keenly interested to learn more about the steps Vanderbilt has taken in recent years to increase access and affordability to all qualified students regardless of their ability to pay. In an era in which  universities are facing increasing scrutiny related to costs, graduation rates, employment prospects and student debt, Vanderbilt’s story was very well received on Capitol Hill.

Over the course of two days, Zeppos met with Sen. Lamar Alexander, Reps. Jim Cooper, Marsha Blackburn, Chuck Fleischmann, Phil Roe, Luke Messer of Indiana (VULS ’94),  as well as staff in the offices of Sen. Bob Corker and Reps. Diane Black and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.).

To cap off the trip, Cooper invited Zeppos to attend the State of the Union as his guest.

Joining Zeppos on his congressional visits were Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Beth Fortune and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Federal Relations Christina West.

Katharine Donato (Vanderbilt University)

Professor of sociology Katharine Donato studies how United States and Mexican immigration policies affect both countries – particularly in the areas of employment, education, health and social services. About two-thirds of the United States’ immigrant population comes from Mexico, and they are facing tougher U.S. immigration polices than two decades ago when federal legislation designed to reduce undocumented workers was first passed. Donato says stricter border controls result in more unauthorized migrants in the United States, and she is optimistic about the newly emerging bipartisan efforts toward immigration reform. She has written numerous papers on immigration and, last year, she published a paper, “What Do We Know About Undocumented Migration?” (Annual Review of Sociology). She edited and contributed to a special volume called Continental Divides: International Migration in the Americas.

Carol Swain (Courtesy Vanderbilt University Law School)

Professor of political science and law Carol Swain has written and studied immigration reform in the United States. She thinks President Obama’s push for one step immigration reform is a mistake. “The proposed immigration proposals recycle old ideas, while avoiding thorny issues. Until policy makers undertake a cost/benefit analysis of the impact of mass legalization on entitlement programs and employment prospects of native-born workers, they cannot effectively reform immigration. Stiffer penalties for being in the country illegally, chain immigration through family reunification, and the impact on African Americans and legal immigrants must be part of the discussion,” said Swain.

Swain edited and contributed to a book of essays called Debating Immigration. There she said that illegal immigration is hurting African Americans because they are losing more jobs to illegal immigrants than other racial or ethnic groups, yet low income black workers don’t have political input in the debate. See a video of Swain in the VUStar studio.

Efren Perez (Vanderbilt)

Assistant professor of political science Efrén O. Pérez‘s research encompasses political psychology and public opinion, with an emphasis on racial and ethnic politics. Pérez’s current research includes a book on implicit bias and U.S. immigration politics, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. Pérez is cautiously optimistic about the prospect of immigration reform, but he doesn’t think that House legislators who strongly opposed immigration reform last time around are going to pass any meaningful reforms.

“Now, people will say that Republicans have had a change of heart because of their poor showing among Latinos. The problem is that Republicans never win a majority of the Latino vote. Simply put, if immigration reform passes, it is more likely to help Democrats, not Republicans, win over more Latinos,” said Pérez. See a video of Pérez explaining what’s wrong with our current immigration policy in the VUStar studio.

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The 113th Congress includes a record number of women, with 98 in the Senate and House of Representatives. New research shows that these women, especially the ones in the minority party, could have a strong impact on future laws.

Research by Vanderbilt political science professor Alan Wiseman and his coauthors find women in Congress in the minority party are more effective than their male counterparts when it comes to introducing and negotiating bills, spurring action on those bills, and ultimately seeing them become law.

“In Congress, men tend to adopt more individualistic and competitive approaches to policymaking and women rely on more collaborative methods,” said Wiseman, co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. The co-authors write, “With this tendency toward collaboration, female legislators in the minority party are expected to experience greater effectiveness than their male minority party colleagues.”

Grading political effectiveness

Wiseman and co-authors Craig Volden and Dana Wittmer based their analysis on a Legislative Effectiveness Score (which was developed by Wiseman and Volden) and rated legislators from 1973 to 2008. They calculated the scores based on:

• Number of bills a legislator introduced;
• How many of those bills received action in committee;
• How many of those bills received action beyond committee;
• How many of those bills passed the House; and
• How many of those bills became law.

The researchers found that women in the minority party were about 33 percent more effective than the average male member of their party. Minority party women were also better at pushing their legislative initiatives through committee and onto the House floor. The average minority party woman had 28 percent more bills reaching the floor.

“This is a process that depends on coalition building,” said Wiseman.

Women in both parties introduced more bills than their male colleagues. But that’s where the gender significance ended. Women in the majority party were not more effective—in terms of their legislative effectiveness score—than their male counterparts.

Practical application

How can this research be applied to today’s Congress? The researchers believe that while the Democratic party may wish they had earned the majority of seats in Congress, the larger number of women in their minority party may lead to greater opportunity for bipartisan coalitions.

The research comes from the paper, “When are Women More Effective Lawmakers than Men?” which will be published in the American Journal of Political Science later in 2013 and prior research, “The Legislative Effectiveness of Women in Congress” (2010.) A policy brief on the study can be found on the CSDI website.

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Everyone knows that the second biggest competition on Super Bowl Sunday is the battle over advertising. Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management experts are available to talk about trends in Super Bowl advertising.

TOPICS:

• For a winning ad, limit the shock and boost up sophisticated storylines
• Celebrities and endorsements: the less we know about a star, the more he/she sells
• Minute-long commercials gaining popularity
• Creating online/multi-media anticipation for the TV ad

EXPERTS:

Steve Posavac, E. Bronson Ingram professor in marketing

Steve Posavac, E. Bronson Ingram professor in marketing. Posavac’s research focuses on consumer judgment and decision processes when buying products, advertising and persuasion. Current projects explore consumer inference when it comes to quality versus price, the role of attitudes in choice, and drivers of consumers’ evaluations of celebrities. Watch a video of Posavac talking about celebrity endorsements.

Jennifer Edson Escalas, associate professor of Marketing, Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management

Jennifer Edson Escalas, associate professor of marketing. Escalas’ research interests focus on consumer narrative processing – thinking in the form of stories – which can create meaning for brands and generate emotional responses to advertising. Read a recent study by Escalas and Jesper Nielsen, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, which found that marketing narratives are more likely to trigger a positive response when following the storyline requires some mental work.

For the latest news and research from Vanderbilt University, go to http://news.vanderbilt.edu/research.

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World-renowned cyclist Lance Armstrong, who was banned from the sport and stripped of his seven Tour de France titles over doping allegations, is speaking out for the first time in a lengthy interview with Oprah Winfrey.

Vanderbilt University law professor Erin O’Hara O’Connor, who is an expert on dispute resolution and the influence of apology on the law, said the benefits of the mea culpa may outweigh potential legal conflicts.

Benefits of apology

“The legal implications of a confession may not be as significant in Armstrong’s case,” said O’Hara O’Connor, the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law and director of graduate studies, Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. “A confession would make prosecution and establishing liability easier, but so many people have already testified that Armstrong was doping that government and private individuals will likely be fully capable of backing their claims without a confession.”

O’Hara O’Connor believes the possible benefits of a confession and apology all depend on how Armstrong uses his words.

“An apology offered after others have had to disprove a denial is usually given very little weight. That will likely be true here too in the sense that the apology won’t lighten people’s sense of Armstrong’s past wrongdoing.”

Erin O'Hara O'Connor (Vanderbilt Law School)

But if Armstrong really has “nothing to lose” at this point, O’Hara O’Connor said a confession and apology won’t be perceived as strategic in the legal or material sense. To be at all effective, however, Armstrong would have to act as though he truly has nothing to lose, or at least that he is willing to give it all away right now

“In this case, he won’t be perceived as using Winfrey and her audience to try to get ahead. So, if he confessed, admitted that he has been a horrible human being, and announced that he plans to devote everything he has to his charity Livestrong, then the charity, and his personal perception might be somewhat redeemed,” said O’Hara O’Connor.

Grading apologies

O’Hara O’Connor has created a formula to grade people’s apologies. She says there are four essential elements to an “A+” apology.

• Identify the specific wrongful act
• Show remorse, without excuse
• Promise not to do it again
• Give an offer of repair or payment

What makes a really bad apology? O’Hara O’Connor gave Senator Bob Packwood’s 1992 apology a failing grade.

“After being accused of a number of forms of wrongdoing with women on Capitol Hill, [Packwood] got on TV and said, ‘I’m sorry for any wrongs I may have committed or have been accused of committing.’ That’s not identifying a wrongful act. That is taking accusations and trying to deflect them.”

Gov. Bill Haslam (r) (Andrew Steele)

Tennessee’s Bill Haslam is a remarkably popular Republican governor during a politically divisive time in the nation’s history, making him a politician to watch, says a Vanderbilt University political scientist.

Haslam has a 68 percent job approval rating, according to new analysis of data from a Vanderbilt Poll conducted late last year. In comparison, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has received a surge of national attention for his actions and comments in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, has a 67 percent job approval rating in his home state, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton Poll.

John Geer (Vanderbilt)

Taking into account margin of errors for the polls, Christie and Haslam are in “a dead heat” as far as popularity ratings in their respective states, said John Geer, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt.

“But Christie’s popularity is inflated due to the aftermath of Sandy,” Geer said. “And so even with that jump in popularity, he and Haslam are tied. Prior to Sandy, Christie’s approval was about 20 points lower. So within that context, Haslam is doing amazingly well.”

Haslam also has more support from across the aisle than Christie, picking up 60 percent approval from Democratic voters. “In today’s polarized environment, these data,” Geer contends, “are really eye-popping.” Christie has a 40 percentage point gap between Democrats and Republicans even with the post-Sandy bounce and Haslam’s is half that. Haslam also enjoys equal support among men and women, which again is highly unusual in today’s politics.

“Overall, these are the kind of numbers that are likely to draw the attention of Republicans and Democrats nationally as discussion heats up about the 2016 presidential election,” contends Geer.

The Vanderbilt Poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points. More information is available online at the website of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt.

Is an angry judge a bad judge?

Not necessarily, says law professor Terry Maroney of Vanderbilt University Law School.

“Anger is the quintessentially judicial emotion,” Maroney says. “It involves appraisal of wrongdoing, attribution of blame and assignment of punishment – precisely what we ask of judges.”

Terry Maroney (Vanderbilt Law School)

That assertion goes against the grain of the conventional view – that judges should not have emotions, and if they do, they should do everything in their power to overcome them.

United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor articulated that conventional view in her 2009 confirmation hearings. Then-nominee Sotomayor was responding to an accusation that she took an overly “empathetic” approach, promoting a nationwide debate.

“We’re not robots (who) listen to evidence and don’t have feelings,” Sotomayor testified. “We have to recognize those feelings and put them aside.”

The reality is more nuanced, particularly for anger, Maroney believes.

In her new article “Angry Judges,” published by the Vanderbilt Law Review, Maroney maps out a path for making good use of anger.

“Righteously angry judges,” she argues, “acknowledge and manage anger in a way that makes them more effective.”

Anger is not always good for judges, Maroney acknowledges. For example, a video captured by the Louisville Courier-Journal and widely circulated on the Internet shows a Kentucky judge furiously berating an attorney who appears simply to be doing his job on behalf of a death row prisoner.

“Anger seems to pose a danger to the neutral, careful decision making we expect of judges,” Maroney writes. It can be “associated with aggression, impulsivity and irrationality.”

Maroney culls evidence from legal opinions, media reports and even YouTube videos to catalog a startling array of bad behavior, ranging from insulting lawyers and litigants to yelling at – and, in one instance, allegedly choking – other judges.

On the other hand, judges “act as society’s anger surrogates,” Maroney says. “We expect them to feel and express anger on our behalf; for example, when sentencing someone like Bernie Madoff, who destroyed lives with a massive financial fraud.”

Maroney draws insights from psychology, philosophy and even neuroscience to demonstrate that anger also can help a judge recognize wrongdoing, communicate authority and make difficult decisions.

So how can judges avoid anger’s dangers without forfeiting its benefits?

Maroney finds a reconciliation of these competing forces in Aristotle’s concept of “virtuous anger.” The righteously angry judge, she writes, is a virtuous judge: he or she gets angry for good reasons, experiences and expresses that anger in a well-regulated manner, and uses anger to motivate and carry out the tasks within his or her authority.

Maroney’s message is finding a receptive audience among judges: she recently has begun a series of judicial trainings, both in the United States and France.

In these trainings she suggests that a judge who recognizes and carefully processes his or her emotions, including anger, is a better judge than one who tries to suppress feelings in the name of impartiality.

“The emotionless judge is a dangerous myth,” Maroney writes. “Judicial emotion cannot be eliminated, but it can be well-regulated. Righteously angry judges deserve not our condemnation but our approval.”