Research
Working papers
Working Projects with Undergraduates in 2022-4
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
Political Theory
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
Peer Reviewed Articles
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.
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.