Research

Google Scholar page

Working papers

Working Projects with Undergraduates in 2022-4

Ford, Brett and Vanessa Baird. Using doctrinal ideology of a case to measure aggregate Supreme Court ideology over time. Status: in preparation (mostly just an outline and some thoughts)

Using the most recent version of the Supreme Court database, we argue that we ought to use the updated version of the measure of the doctrinal ideology of a case instead of what is currently used: percent liberal of reversals. We explain why reversals were an improvement over using all cases, but we also show in this paper that some assumptions about why this was improved are not empirically sound. The argument for using only reversals depends on two assumptions: litigants in some cases place the question in a different place on an ideological continuum than litigants in other cases, and 2) petitioners are likely rational. We show that the first assumption is valid but that the second is not. We attempt to show the validity of our measure by looking at over time and across policy area illustrations.

Gendhill, Lauren, Courtney Nava, and Vanessa A. Baird.  When an Internal Locus of Control Unravels and Produces Health Risk-Taking in the Early Stages of COVID-19. Status: Rejected from Social Science and Medicine, after multiple R&Rs.

Using a nationally representative sample in the summer and fall of 2020, investigated the relative merits of self-efficacy and internal locus of control from the literature on the health behavior model (HBM) for the decision to take COVID-19 seriously. While testing the robustness of the effects, however, we found that this effect does not apply to all people equally: among Republicans, an external locus of control made people more serious about taking COVID precautions. Looking back at the literature, we found that researchers identified a limited set of circumstances in which an internal locus of control can lead to overconfidence, a sense of invulnerability, or a sense of wanting to appear strong, which then might undermine a sense that one must be proactive about health (e.g. adolescent decision-making and other risk-taking behaviors of drivers or pilots). This effect is less likely to be true of self-efficacy which has more to do with themselves and less to do with external actors. With this idea in mind, we tested a new set of hypotheses and found that for risk takers, and who have reason to be less fearful, the more internal the locus of control, the more careful they were about COVID.  For who have reason to be fearful, they take COVID seriously when they have more external locus of control. Given these findings, scholars ought to expand our understanding of the mechanisms by which internal locus of control translates into a person taking their health seriously.

In 2022, we also submitted new questions and an experimental vignette that we pre-registered to further nail down the causal inferences from the 2022 data.

Other working papers

The self and the law (and political violence)

Wolak, Jennifer, and Vanessa A. Baird. The impact of social identities on support for the rule of law.

This paper finds that most people have multiple social identities, including a combination of superordinate identities as well as subgroup identities. While subgroup identities may pull some people away from social and political (democratic) norms, they only do so when in isolation from superordinate identification with the nation (i.e., patriotism). Since subgroup identification often goes hand in hand with superordinate identification, these identities rarely undercut social and democratic norms.

 

Vanessa A. Baird. Book project: The impact of Life Circumstances on Support for Violence and the Rule of Law

This book project uses data from the 2016- 2024 CCES  to understand what makes people support the rule of law, focusing on what makes people support even unjust laws but also looking at what makes people believe that political violence is acceptable.  This psychological account looks particularly at explanations that allowed the transition from violence as the state of society to one that makes people accept potentially disagreeable political outcomes versus the hope that they can get what they want through violent means. Many accounts of support for constitutional democracies involve the success of socialization.  We look at attributes of people that would have made them support the transition before socialization took root.

 

Barwick, Corey and Vanessa A. Baird.  On the Nature of the Rule of Law.  Status: rejected from Law and Society Review

Using data from the 2016 CCES, this paper investigates the sources of support for the rule of law. Weaving together previous work on identity and procedural justice, threat and political tolerance, the locus of control and moral disengagement, we argue that support for the rule of law can be explained by some of the ways people see themselves vis-à-vis society. In particular, we find that when people’s sense of themselves is insecure or threatened, support for the law unravels. Yet, we also find that certain identity insecurities, such as a sensitivity to social norms, make the idea of the law more appealing. The analysis corroborates decades of research showing that support for the law is connected to other democratic norms, and that education can strengthen the connection between the abstract rule of law and some concrete applications. In the end, the findings offer some speculative insights into some of the puzzles in other areas of legal culture.

 

Vanessa A. Baird.  Non-material suffering and support for political violence.  Status: Presented at Midwest Political Science Association meeting, April 2022.   

Using data from the 2020 CCES, this paper investigates the sources of support for several forms of politically motivated violence: protest violence, vigilante violence, and (illegitimate) police violence. Findings suggest that non-economic factors are the primary drivers of this support: negative emotions, an external locus of control (Bandura, 2015) and personality (dogmatism and a lower sense of empathy, and optimism) predicts higher support for violence, while support for the rule of law and other democratic norms strongly reduce violent tendencies. Findings also provide a clue for why economic factors do not always predict outbreaks of various forms of violence: many of these non-economic factors seem to be “activated” by economic grievances. A corollary of this is that the absence of economic grievances reduce the impact of negative life experiences and personality. The analysis suggests that when people’s expectations about their life, status, and social identity are violated, they support violence at higher levels. Interestingly, racial or ethnic group identity reduces support for violence among non-whites, but among whites, such an identity increases support for violence. That, combined with the inference from the external locus of control, suggests that when people are empowered to influence the electoral system or in their own lives, they do not support violence.

 

 

Law and Economics

Baird, Vanessa A.  Why the Supreme Court Cannot Make Liberal Economic Policy: The Effect of Profit Minded Litigants’ Strategies on the Supreme Court’s Agenda.  

Status: Measurement portion of this paper is in preparation with Brett Ford, undergraduate student.

This paper offers an explanation for why the Supreme Court’s economic agenda has been primarily conservative historically.  It hands down liberal economic cases from time to time but has few eras where legal change builds case by case, such as we have seen in free speech or civil rights.  This paper builds on findings from Baird (2004, 2007) that show that the Supreme Court’s agenda varies with Justices’ policy priorities from four to six years before, with the argument that future cases took that long to reach the Court.  Yet incentives vary across different kinds of litigants, complicating the story; when the Court is perceived to be liberal, corporate interests are far more likely to be risk averse than other interests and may be more likely to settle or even fail to answer a suit by simply being more likely to accept the other party’s terms.  Thus, important economic cases that might alter public law in a liberal direction are not among the cases from which Justice choose to decide.  This means that the Supreme Court is institutionally incapacitated to protect consumers, workers, or the environment. Even a liberal Court will be hindered in its ability to reverse course from previous economic conservative decisions because it will lack a sufficient number of cases to promote such legal change.

Pedagogy

Textbook. An introduction to statistics for causal inference: historical illustrations from the social, health, and life sciences. Table of contents.

Grant Proposal to test efficacy of learning assessments. NSF. Status: Based on preliminary feedback from NSF, we are waiting to publish other work before pursuing a large data collection effort.

 

Baird, Vanessa A. Pedagogical Grant to Create Multimedia Illustrations of Concepts in Constitutional Law to Improve Distance Learning During COVID-19. Institute of Humane Studies. Status: Rejected. Examples of illustrations that I created in the past.

Baird, Vanessa A. Why We Should Teach Critical Thinking without Assigning Essays: a suggestion for what to do instead

 

Political Theory

Baird, Vanessa A. Ditching Justice: Testing Hobbes’ Theories in Contemporary Political, Social, and Legal Psychology. 

Hobbes tells us to give up on justice because it leads to ‘competition for honor and dignity,’ which leads to ‘envy and hatred, and finally war.’  The evidence that people’s “honor and dignity” are more supported by fair procedures than fair outcomes (Tyler, et al. 2007) would probably surprise Hobbes, as would the evidence of the high support for even unjust laws and unfair legal institutions.  On the other hand, when people do not identify with the dominant group in society, their dignity is not supported by fair procedures, and they are less likely to accept disagreeable outcomes.  Extrapolating from this, I argue that Hobbes’ advice about ditching justice in our political deliberations is even more important.  Appealing to justice or the truth in our political deliberations (“I am right – you are wrong;” “You are racist – I am not,”) likely undermine a person’s honor and dignity could force them to seek alternative separationist identities, based on ethnic, racial or party lines where their self-esteem can be bolstered.  This, in turn, could lead to lower support for disagreeable democratic procedures and laws that are perceived as unjust.

Published work: Google Scholar page

Books

Baird, Vanessa A. 2007. Answering the Call of the Court: How Justices and Litigants Set the Supreme Court Agenda. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Peer Reviewed Articles

Baird, Vanessa, and Jennifer Wolak. “Why Some Blame Politics for Their Personal Problems.” American Politics Research (2021): 1532673X211013463.

According to an algorithm created by Altmetrics, above paper was the 20th most influential Political Science article published in 2021 (out of 197590 papers). The Altmetric Attention Score is designed to measure the attention an article receives, from other academic sources, but also weighs quite heavily the representation of articles in the news media. The article was written up in Psych News Daily, (now named Such Science), and has been tweeted 256 times from 253 users, with an upper bound of 1,071,782 followers. 88% of tweets were by members of the public, and 9% were other scientists. Here is the Such Science article.

Baird, Vanessa A. and Debra Javeline. 2013. “Institutional Persuasion to Support Minority Rights in Russia” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 21, 1: 33-58.

Liu, Amy and Vanessa A. Baird. 2012. “Linguistic Recognition as a Source of Confidence in the Judicial System.” Comparative Political Studies, 20 (10): 1-27.

Javeline, Debra and Vanessa A. Baird. 2011. “The Surprisingly Nonviolent Aftermath of the Beslan School Hostage Taking.”  Problems of Post-Communism, 58(4-5): 3-22.  

Fitzgerald, Jennifer, and Vanessa A. Baird. 2011. “Taking a Step Back: Teaching Critical Thinking by Distinguishing Appropriate Types of Evidence”. PS: Political Science & Politics 44(3) 619-624.

Baird, Vanessa A. and Debra Javeline. 2010. “The Effects of National and Local Funding on Judicial Performance: Perceptions of Russia’s Lawyers.”  Law and Society Review 44(2): 331-64.  

Baird, Vanessa A. and Tonja Jacobi.  2009.  How the Dissent Becomes the Majority: Using Federalism to Transform Coalitions in the U.S. Supreme Court, Duke Law Review 59 (November; 2): 183-238.

Baird, Vanessa A. and Tonja Jacobi.  2009. Judicial Agenda Setting through Signaling and Strategic Litigant Responses.”  Washington University Journal of Law& Policy 29: 215-239.

Baird, Vanessa A. and Debra Javeline. 2007. “The Persuasive Power of Russian Courts,” Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 60 (3): 429-42.

Javeline, Debra and Vanessa A. Baird.  2007. “Who Sues Government? Evidence from the Moscow Theater Hostage Case,” Comparative Political Studies 40 (July): 858-85.

McLaren, Lauren, and Vanessa A Baird. 2006. “Of Time and Causality: A Simple Test of the Requirement of Social Capital in Making Democracy Work in Italy,” Political Studies 54 (December): 889–897.

Baird, Vanessa A. and Amy Gangl. 2006. “Shattering the Myth of Legality: The Impact of the Media’s Framing of Supreme Court Procedures on Perceptions of Fairness,” Political Psychology 27 (August): 597-614.

Baird, Vanessa A.  2004. “The Effect of Politically Salient Decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Agenda,” Journal of Politics 66 (August): 755-72.

Baird, Vanessa A.  2001.  “Building Institutional Legitimacy: The Role of Procedural Justice,” Political Research Quarterly, 54 (June): 333-54.

Gibson, James L., Gregory A. Caldeira and Vanessa A. Baird.  1998.  “On the Legitimacy of National High Courts,” American Political Science Review, 92 (June): 343-358.

The first version of above article is related to the first paper I wrote in graduate school. Initially, I focused on just East and West Germany; this paper was the Building Institutional Legitimacy above. Jim and Greg invited me to be their coauthor and test the hypothesis with a wider set of countries. In 2020, it received the Lasting Contribution Award from American Political Science Association’s Law and Courts Section from 2020. It has over a thousand citations and counts as one of the most cited papers in the subfield of law and courts.

Baird, Vanessa, and Alan Stone.  1998.  “Why Privatization: The Case of German Telecommunications,” Social Science Quarterly, 79 (March): 193 – 211.

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