United States Senate Research Articles

Election administration harms and ballot design: A study of Florida's 2018 United States Senate race

AbstractWe introduce a typology of election administration harms and apply it to empirically study the consequences of ballot design. Our typology distinguishes between individual, electoral, and systemic harms. Together, it clarifies why ballot design can be a particular vulnerability in election administration. Using both ballot‐level and precinct‐level data, we revisit Florida's 2018 United States Senate race, in which Broward County's ballot design flouted federal guidelines and, according to critics, was pivotal to the outcome. We estimate that Broward's ballot design induced roughly 25,000 voters to undervote in a race determined by about 10,000 votes and that these excess undervotes were concentrated among low‐information voters. Broward's ballot did not, however, affect the outcome of the election. Nonetheless, flawed ballot designs are still concerning in an age of voter distrust. Given the risk that flawed ballots can cause systemic harm, we offer a roadmap for procedural reforms to improve ballot design.

Public responses and parasocial relationships following senator John Fetterman's depression disclosure.

Research has found that when a public figure discloses an illness, it can motivate members of the public to reconsider their own health behaviors, particularly when they have a parasocial relationship with the public figure. When the public figure is a politician, it is possible that partisan differences may also influence emotional, attentional, and behavioral responses to health news. We empirically examined public responses to Democrat John Fetterman's disclosure of his treatment for depression shortly after he was inducted into the United States Senate as the junior senator from Pennsylvania in 2023. Using a survey of adult Pennsylvania residents who identified as eligible voters in April 2023, we found that 204 respondents were aware of the news of Fetterman's diagnosis of and treatment for depression. Our data revealed that differences in demographics and parasocial relationships-both positive and negative-with Fetterman predicted different patterns of emotional responses to the news. In addition, age, anger, a negative parasocial relationship, and a positive parasocial relationship were associated with additional outcomes, including attention to news about the disclosure and depression-related information seeking. Mental health advocates could use politicians' depression disclosures to provide information at a time when people are paying more attention to the condition; however, they may need to find other public figures to counteract negative responses to partisan officials. Policymakers could also consider funding mental health campaigns, which could be launched alongside public figure disclosures.

Invoking time limits for managing responses in US Senate Judiciary Committee lower court nomination hearings

This study uses Conversation Analysis to investigate an interactional practice in US Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) lower court nomination hearings. Drawing from 13 hr and 36 min of data from Q&A rounds across 12 SJC hearings during 2020 and 2022, I document how senators’ invocations of the hearing’s time limits function as a resource for managing judicial nominees’ responses to their questions. I examine senators’ time invocations (TIs) in two main sequential areas: (1) When designing questions, and (2) when pursuing or challenging nominees’ responses. As a feature of question design, TIs help senators ‘move things along’ during their brief questioning time, as well as pin nominees to respond in ways preferable to the question. As a feature of pursuits or challenges, TIs help senators manage nominees’ off-topic, evasive, or unsound responses, thus ascribing different levels of accountability onto both nominees (for their inadequate responses to senators’ initial questions) and senators themselves (for the sequential and affiliative consequences associated with doing pursuing/challenging). Seven extracts are presented from a collection of 82 cases. Findings reveal how time limits can be leveraged by senators to advance various goals in this highly constrained and institutionalized context, including exhibiting and implicitly legitimizing partisan bias.

Generative and Adversarial: Art and the Prospects of AI

Abstract This essay serves as an introduction to the Questionnaire on Art and Machine Learning. It opens with the testimony of Sam Altman before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Privacy, Technology and the Law in May 2023, following the launch of ChatGPT a year earlier. ChatGPT is part of a wave of generative AI: AI that not only classifies or analyzes information but also generates it. Media responses to ChatGPT and a range of other text-to-image and text-to-video generators—including Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, Deep AI, and Sora—tend to divide between “Boosterism” and “Doomerism”: They either echo Silicon Valley's habitual refrain about the inherent goodness of technological innovation or they describe dystopian scenarios in which human agency is all but eclipsed. “Generative and Adversarial: Art and the Prospects of AI” argues that artists, art historians, critics, and curators offer far more nuanced perspectives on the prospects of AI. Borrowing the language of “generative adversarial networks”—one of several machine-learning models that have revolutionized image production in the past decade—it interrogates AI's aesthetic, political, and ethical possibilities, as well as its historical genealogies.

Activities to Engage Students in the "Authentic" Work as U.S. Senators About Voting Rights Issues

In this article, we utilize resources mainly provided by the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate along with other primary and secondary sources to discuss a unit plan for students to research voting rights issues in modern American society. First, a brief historical overview of voting rights issues in the United States is given. Next, our focus shifts to give a short literature review on the importance of teaching public issues as well as the significance of class discussions with topics some may deem controversial. Finally, the steps and resources of our unit plan are discussed. The unit plan is framed for the middle school social studies classroom and draws on relevant indicators from the C3 Framework by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS).

Bias and excess variance in election polling: a not-so-hidden Markov model

Abstract With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an election is by assessing the difference between the poll result and election result for polls conducted within a few days of the day of the election. Analysing such polling error data is notoriously difficult with typical models being extremely sensitive to the time between the poll and the election. We leverage hidden Markov models traditionally used for election forecasting to flexibly capture time-varying preferences and treat the election result as a peek at the typically hidden Markovian process. Our results are much less sensitive to the choice of time window, avoid conflating shifting preferences with polling error, and are more interpretable despite a highly flexible model. We demonstrate these results with data on polls from the 2004 through 2020 US Presidential elections and 1992 through 2020 US Senate elections, concluding that previously reported estimates of bias in Presidential elections were too extreme by 10%, estimated bias in Senatorial elections was too extreme by 25%, and excess variability estimates were also too large.

United States Senate malapportionment: A geographical investigation

This study is a geographical investigation of malapportionment in the United States Senate, using national-level tables and graphs for all census years from 1790 through 2020, and state-level maps for census years 1790, 1820, 1920, and 2020. Senate malapportionment is found to have worsened over time, with geographically varying manifestations. The article proposes an expansion of the Senate using the Method of Equal Proportions, which would considerably diminish the degree of malapportionment if adopted.

Addressing the Marketing Practices of Medicare Advantage Plans.

The Medicare Advantage (MA) Program, home to nearly half of the eligible Medicare population, has recently come under increased scrutiny. Recent investigations conducted by the United States Senate Committee on Finance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have uncovered marketing practices of MA insurance agents that "were not complying with current regulation and unduly pressuring beneficiaries, as well as failing to provide accurate or enough information to assist a beneficiary in making an informed enrollment decision." These findings come at a time in which MA programs are under investigation for denials of prior authorization requests that fall within Medicare guidelines for covered health services. In this Commentary we consider the backdrop for the growing scrutiny of the MA program and the implications thereof to its future trajectory.

Out-Of-State Donors and Legislative Surrogacy in the U.S. Senate

Studies show that the extraordinary growth in campaign expenditures is fueled by a small, elite subset of the donor population that gives generously to candidates across the country. It is often assumed that the wealthy influence policy outcomes through such gifts to politicians; however, the representational benefits of giving to politicians out-of-state are unclear. What do donors gain legislatively when they give to legislators living out-of-state? I study the campaign financing of US senators over three decades (1989–2018) and find that senators receive the most money from out-of-state donors when they face reelection and risk losing. In this context, donors invest in the collective benefits of party representation when they give money to out-of-state senators. However, when giving to senators “off cycle,” out-of-state donors behave as “consumers” who reward senators for the positions they have taken. Each bill sponsored by a senator when they are not up for reelection leads to a corresponding increase of about 1% in receipts from out-of-state donors. These results offer a more complete view of the legislative surrogacy that the wealthy receive when they give to politicians out-of-state and suggest possible links between campaign contributions and public policy outcomes.

Abusive taxation of religious minorities. A comparative study of Tai Ji Men in Taiwan and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in France.

On 23 April 2023, US Senator Orrin Hatch passed away at age 88. Two of his main interests were tax reform and religious liberty, topics that sometimes happen to intersect.2 Senator Hatch was well aware that abusive taxation can target religious or spiritual movements or religiously motivated advocacy groups which, for whatever reason, are disliked by some tax bureaucrats. One such instance is the case of Tai Ji Men in Taiwan, which remains unre- solved after more than 25 years of legal battles and public advocacy.3 I will com- pare that case with ones that the European Court of Human Rights has consid- ered in the last two decades.

Abusive taxation of religious minorities. A comparative study of Tai Ji Men in Taiwan and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in France.

On 23 April 2023, US Senator Orrin Hatch passed away at age 88. Two of his main interests were tax reform and religious liberty, topics that sometimes happen to intersect. Senator Hatch was well aware that abusive taxation can target religious or spiritual movements or religiously motivated advocacy groups which, for whatever reason, are disliked by some tax bureaucrats. One such instance is the case of Tai Ji Men in Taiwan, which remains unresolved after more than 25 years of legal battles and public advocacy. I will compare that case with ones that the European Court of Human Rights has considered in the last two decades.

The logic for US ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

ABSTRACT The United States has accepted increasingly stringent limits on nuclear testing, culminating in the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. However, the US Senate in 1999 failed to consent to ratification, given concerns about verifying the treaty and maintaining safe and reliable US nuclear weapons without testing. Since then, the US Stockpile Stewardship Program has matured and allowed certification that US nuclear weapons remain safe and reliable without nuclear explosive testing. Likewise, advances in the US Nuclear Detonation Detection System and the International Monitoring System make virtually all tests detectable. Bringing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into force is in the US interest, as it would lock in an American advantage in nuclear knowledge and expertise and hinder other states from developing more sophisticated nuclear arms. Unfortunately, however, American domestic politics and the difficult international environment make it unlikely that the treaty will enter into force in the near term.

Voting Rights in Georgia: A Short History

Abstract: This article is a brief history of the struggle for Black voting rights and against determined opposition in Georgia since the end of the Civil War. After a brief period during Reconstruction when there was significant Black voting and Black representation in the Georgia legislature, Black people were systematically denied both voting rights and representation in the state of Georgia. After 1944, when the US Supreme Court ruled against the all-white primary, and especially after 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, white Georgia politicians tried any number of strategies to limit minority voting strength, from efforts to limit Black registration, to manipulating election districts and voting rules to keep African Americans from winning elective office. These efforts continued, and in many ways increased after the Supreme Court in 2013 ended the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Nonetheless, the increasing demographic power of metro Atlanta, with its large minority population, was a key in 2020 to the narrow victory of Joseph Biden in the presidential race in Georgia, and the election of two liberal Democratic US Senators, including the first African American and Jew elected in the state's history.

Realpolitik in the Anthropocene: Resilience, Neoclassical Realism, and the Paris Agreement

Abstract It has been observed that the Paris Agreement has become an “analogy” of diplomatic success and institutional design because it allows emissions reduction commitments to be determined at the national level. While this is widely attributed to the United States’ insistence on excluding any provisions that would have required US Senate ratification, the success of Paris stems more from the way the agreement partly circumvents the divergent interests of developed and developing countries by allowing states to pursue their own mitigation strategies based on domestic distributional and ideological politics rather than interstate cooperation and/or competition. It is this accommodation of both an institutionalist logic of absolute gains and a more realist logic of relative gains that ultimately underpins the diplomatic and institutional design success of Paris. However, the resonance of realism, at least in its neoclassical form, also stems from its greater capacity to accommodate the heightened socioecological complexity, interconnectedness, and unknowability occasioned by the Anthropocene than other branches of Anthropocentric international relations theory. This potential is outlined in this Forum article by sketching the epistemological and ontological connections between neoclassical realism and the concept of resilience.

Democracy, Authoritarianism and Global Economic Governance

Four weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, US Senator John Kennedy accused the Biden administration of indirectly providing over $17 billion to Moscow as Putin was gearing up for war. In August 2021, the International Monetary Fund had indeed approved a historic $650 billion allocation of Special Drawing Rights to help member countries struggling with the Covid crisis. Russia benefited from these money transfers, as did Iran, China, and Myanmar, notwithstanding the authoritarian consolidation of these regimes. Kennedy's op-ed sparked a debate about the lack of transparency in the use of crisis resources and led to the adoption in the United States of the ‘Russia and Belarus SDR Exchange Prohibition Act’, which bans currency transactions with these countries through the IMF, following the imposition of 2,500 sanctions by the US Treasury since February 2022. The op-ed also reignited a decades-old debate over whether international organisations such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) should be held accountable for supporting authoritarian and corrupt governments or interfering in the politics of sovereign nations.

The US government customer concentration and the firm innovation

PurposeThis study examines the impact of the US government customer concentration and product innovation in supplier firms. The US government customer concentration is defined as the proportion of sales made by a supplier firm to the US government as a major customer. To measure product innovation, the author uses two key metrics: the number of patents and the novelty of the patents. The results indicate that a supplier firm’s relationship with the US government, as measured by the tenure of the relationship, has a significant impact on product innovation. Furthermore, the author shows that changes in the composition of the US government, Senate can also affect the level of innovation in supplier firms.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs the Compustat’s Segment Customer database and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Patent Citation database to gather information regarding patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The author also incorporates data from US Congressional committees from the 96th to 115th Congresses to assess the effect of changes in seniority of US senators on influential committees on the firm’s innovation. For a robustness test, the author utilizes a propensity score matched analysis.FindingsThe author demonstrates that a firm’s dependence on the US government as a customer channel for an extended period negatively impacts the firm’s innovation efficiency, as measured by the number of patents, citations and novelty of the patents. In addition, the author provides evidence that changes in the seniority of US senators on influential committees have a significant impact on firms located in the same state as the new senior senators. These firms decrease innovative efforts due to the political connections, resulting in lower levels of innovation. These findings are robust after controlling the endogeneity issues. In conclusion, this study contributes to the existing literature by offering insight into the relationship between customer concentration and firm innovation. The findings highlight the importance of considering the relationship between firms and their customer base in determining innovation outcomes.Originality/valueThis study demonstrates that a heavy reliance on the US government as a customer channel has a detrimental impact on a firm’s innovation efficiency. Furthermore, the author analyzes the exogenous shock of changes in the seniority of US senators on the relationship between customer dependence and innovation. By utilizing a propensity matched sample, the author addresses endogeneity concerns and provides robust evidence for empirical findings. In conclusion, this study sheds light on the complex relationship between customer dependence and firm innovation, particularly in the context of the US government as a sales channel.

The rhetoric of democracy in United States Senate campaign debates

ABSTRACT This project analyzes the rhetoric of democracy, voting, and elections in United States Senate campaign debates during the 2022 midterm elections. Using C-SPAN video archives, we examine candidate exchanges focused on the 2020 election, ballot access, and the peaceful transfer of power. We find that while Democratic and Republican candidates used dramatically different language and arguments to describe their positions on elections, candidates in both parties laid claim to the mantle of “democracy defender.” Democracy functioned as a floating signifier deployed even by election deniers who recast election interference as election protection and positioned themselves as agents of responsive government while obfuscating President Trump’s, and in some cases their own, responsibility for spreading election conspiracies. This rhetorical analysis illuminates how political elites approach questions of democracy and electoral fairness in an era shaped by misinformation and fractured communication environments. Our study advances understanding of the dialectical tensions in conceptualizations of democracy and the role of campaign debates in a post-truth rhetorical climate.

Send more guns: Biden’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget plan for Africa

This paper examines US security policy toward Africa. It describes and analyses US security assistance to Africa and Biden’s security assistance budget request for Africa for Fiscal Year 2024. It also reports testimony of the commander of Africom at the hearings on the budget request held before the US House and US Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2023.

Drug review process advancement and required manufacturer and contract research oraganization responses.

The United States Senate passed the "FDA Modernization Act 2.0." on September 29, 2022. Although the effectiveness of this Bill, which aims to eliminate the mandatory use of laboratory animals in new drug development, is limited, it represents a significant trend that will change the shape of drug applications in the United States and other countries. However, pharmaceutical companies have not taken major steps towards the complete elimination of animal testing from the standpoint of product safety, where they prioritize patient safety. Nonetheless, society is becoming increasingly opposed to animal testing, and efforts will be made to use fewer animals and conduct fewer animal tests as a natural and reasonable response. These changes eventually alter the shape of new drug applications. Based on the assumption that fewer animal tests will be conducted or fewer animals will be used in testing, this study explored bioinformatics and new technologies as alternatives to compensate for reduced information and provide a picture of how future new drug applications may look. The authors also discuss the directions that pharmaceutical companies and nonclinical contract research organizations should adopt to promote the replacement, reduction, and refinement of animals used in research, teaching, testing, and exhibitions.

Testimony to the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging at a Hearing on Guardianship and Alternatives: Protection and Empowerment

These remarks are from Dr. Shogren’s written testimony on March 30, 2023, at a hearing of the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging on “Guardianship and Alternatives: Protection and Empowerment.” These remarks and a video of Dr. Shogren’s oral testimony is publicly available at https://www.aging.senate.gov/hearings/guardianship-and-alternatives-protection-and-empowerment as well as in the Congressional Record.