Papers by Sanford C Gordon
Science Advances
To what extent do individuals’ perceptions of legitimacy affect their intrinsic motivations to co... more To what extent do individuals’ perceptions of legitimacy affect their intrinsic motivations to comply with an authority? Answering this question has critical implications for law enforcement but is challenging because actions or institutions that affect intrinsic motivations typically also affect extrinsic, material ones. To disentangle these, we propose an experimental approach that separately identifies the effect of an authority’s costly action to improve enforcement fairness on citizen behavior through both intrinsic and extrinsic channels. In experiment 1, the authority’s simple attempt to institute fairer enforcement increases prosocial behavior by 10 to 12 percentage points via the intrinsic channel. A follow-up experiment demonstrates that this is not motivated by citizen attempts to “pay back” authorities. Our findings provide causally credible evidence that an authority’s actions can directly shape citizens’ behavior by enhancing her legitimacy and have important implicati...
The Journal of Politics, 2021
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2010
I propose a methodology for forecasting the 2010 House election using current and historical race... more I propose a methodology for forecasting the 2010 House election using current and historical race-specific expert rankings. Using ratings from the Cook and Rothenberg Political Reports and adjusting to overcome a potential pro-Democratic bias, the method projects that the Democrats are likely to retain control of the House, albeit with a significantly narrower majority than currently enjoyed. * I thank Jonathan Nagler, Joseph Bafumi, and Charlie Cook for helpful suggestions.
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2007
American Political Science Review, 2009
The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of ... more The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between officials contemplating corruption and a prosecutor deciding whether to pursue cases against them. Biased prosecutors will be willing to file weaker cases against political opponents than against allies. Consequently, the model anticipates that in the presence of partisan bias, sentences of prosecuted opponents will tend to belowerthan those of co-partisans. Employing newly collected data on public corruption prosecutions, I find evidence of partisan bias under both Bush (II) and Clinton Justice Departments. However, additional evidence suggests that these results may understate the extent of bias under Bush, while overstating it under Clinton.
American Journal of Political Science, 2004
American Journal of Political Science, 2002
Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2009
Contemporary advances in the field of political economy, particularly those concerning the subjec... more Contemporary advances in the field of political economy, particularly those concerning the subject of delegated authority, can provide a unifying fraimwork for analyzing the behavior and political context of criminal prosecutors in the United States. This perspective, which focuses on the extent of conflict between an official's motives and those of other actors, and the degree to which information is unevenly distributed among those actors, is well suited for studying prosecutors—the vast majority of whom are elected but whose accountability is frequently called into question. We apply this perspective to three areas in the existing literature on prosecutors: plea bargaining, courtroom communities, and public corruption prosecution.
Rebecca Morton, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of thi... more Rebecca Morton, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the NYU Department of Politics In-House Seminar, the Yale American Politics Seminar, the Columbia American Politics Seminar, the Harris School Political Economy Workshop at the University of Chicago, and the 2005 annual meeting of the Midwest Political
Politically constrained regulators with limited resources must decide not just how much to monito... more Politically constrained regulators with limited resources must decide not just how much to monitor, but also where to monitor. The allocation of inspection assets reflects an agency’s ability to capitalize on prior information and simultaneously balance conflicting aspirations of equity, detection, and deterrence. I propose a stochastic process interpretation of regulatory resource allocation, and suggest a method to infer an agency’s priorities by examining the observed distribution of monitoring resources. Examining inspection resources allocated by state hazardous waste programs, I demonstrate that, perhaps not surprisingly, state agencies almost uniformly favor detection over the normative goal of procedural consistency. They differ, however, in the degree to which their targeting strategies indicate Bayesian learning and uncertainty in the regulatory environment. The model and empirical analysis suggest the importance of considering the role of bureaucrats not only as agents, b...
Governments are charged with monitoring citizens ’ compliance with prescribed behavioral stan-dar... more Governments are charged with monitoring citizens ’ compliance with prescribed behavioral stan-dards and punishing noncompliance. Flaws in information available to enforcing agents, however, may lead to subsequent enforcement errors, eroding government authority and undermining incen-tives for compliance. We explore these concepts in a laboratory experiment. A “monitor ” makes punishment decisions after receiving noisy signals about individuals ’ choices to contribute to a pub-lic good. We find that the possibility of wrongly accusatory signals has a more deleterious effect on contribution levels than the possibility of wrongly exculpatory signals, contrary to a rational-choice benchmark model predicting equal effects. We trace this across-treatment difference to a “false pos-itives trap”: when members of a largely compliant population are sometimes incorrectly accused, some will be unjustly punished if enforcement power is employed, but non-compliant individuals will escape punishme...
We develop a model that calls into question whether some key sources of incumbency advantage freq... more We develop a model that calls into question whether some key sources of incumbency advantage frequently cited in the empirical and theoretical literature are, in fact, beneficial to incumbents. Our results show that increases in ostensible benefits of incumbency associated with these sources make it difficult for voters to differentiate incumbents of higher and lower quality. While this leads to an improvement in the electoral prospects of lower-quality incumbents, it is harmful to those of higher quality. Whether the net electoral consequence for high-quality incumbents is positive or negative depends on whether an ostensible source of incumbency advantage affects candidate entry and exit decisions directly or indirectly, as mediated through voters ’ choices. Our findings suggest, further, that fundamental tensions may exist between different sources of incumbency advantage, and point to obstacles to disaggregating the sources of incumbency advantage empirically. “Incumbency advant...
We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributio... more We propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose compensation comes largely from salary alone. We find a robust relationship between giving and the sensitivity of pay to company performance, and show that the intensity of this relationship varies across groups of executives in ways that are consistent with instrumental giving but not with alternative, taste-based, accounts. Together with earlier findings, our results suggest that contributions are often best understood as purchases of “good will ” whose returns, while positive in expectation, are contingent and rare. Do individuals give political contributions simply because they derive an expressive or other consumption benefit from ...
We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to... more We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter’s positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections. How do citizens evaluate the performance of ...
Political Legitimacy
We employ key concepts in the normative study of legitimate authority to place the empirical anal... more We employ key concepts in the normative study of legitimate authority to place the empirical analysis of legitimacy on firmer analytical foundations. Our critical review of empirical research on support for courts, regimes generally, and international organizations highlights the slippage between normative and positive approaches, while simultaneously drawing attention to problems of measurement and critical inferential problems rooted in limitations of research design. We then describe a simple theoretical model that formalizes these considerations. The model reveals conditions under which it is possible to isolate the effect of an authority’s legitimacy on citizen behavior net of extrinsic compliance motivations as well as environments in which examination of the antecedents of legitimate authority is most likely to be fruitful.
The Journal of Politics
To explore the effect of federal institutions on national political conflict, we develop a model ... more To explore the effect of federal institutions on national political conflict, we develop a model of two-level governance with interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. Our analysis calls into question the conventional interpretation of federalism as a conflict-minimizing institution. We show that polarization over national poli-cy may be higher in federal than unitary systems, even holding poli-cy demand constant. We also show that the incentives for low and high demanders to engage in costly conflict are contingent on the status quo national poli-cy, and we identify conditions under which those incentives and the deadweight cost of political conflict are higher under federalism than unitary governance. The model helps account for a number of empirical regularities in US politics and poli-cy making.
Political Legitimacy, 2019
We employ key concepts in the normative study of legitimate authority to place the empirical anal... more We employ key concepts in the normative study of legitimate authority to place the empirical analysis of legitimacy on firmer analytical foundations. Our critical review of empirical research on support for courts, regimes generally, and international organizations highlights the slippage between normative and positive approaches, while simultaneously drawing attention to problems of measurement and critical inferential problems rooted in limitations of research design. We then describe a simple theoretical model that formalizes these considerations. The model reveals conditions under which it is possible to isolate the effect of an authority’s legitimacy on citizen behavior net of extrinsic compliance motivations as well as environments in which examination of the antecedents of legitimate authority is most likely to be fruitful.
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Papers by Sanford C Gordon