Research

Committees and Distortionary Vagueness

(with Colin Krainin) (Last updated September 2017)

We study a model of a generalized committee, for example a legislature or legislative subcommittee, bargaining over how precisely to transmit information to the mass public. In our model, biased committee members have an incentive to distort the public's behavior by making vague communications. We demonstrate two principal results. First, delegating decision making to a committee with an agenda-setting chair frequently reduces vagueness relative to delegating to an individual or a committee with no agenda setter. Second, when the committee chair and the median committee member are biased in opposing directions on an issue, more precise information is provided than when the chair and committee are of like bias. 

Explaining Instability in the Stability and Growth Pact: The Contribution of Member State Power and Euroskepticism to the Euro Crisis

(with Mark Hallerberg) (Last updated December 2015)

Published in Comparative Political Studies 

The Stability and Growth Pact clearly failed to prevent the euro crisis.  We contend that the failure was due largely to the ability of the Member States to undermine the Pact's operation. The European Commission served as a ``watchdog" to monitor fiscal performance. The Member States themselves, however, collectively had the ability to change the content of the reports for individual states. We confirm the expectation that powerful Member States had the most success in undermining the role of the Commission. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find supporting evidence for our argument that governments with euroskeptic populations behind them were also more successful in weakening the Commission's warnings. These results have broader theoretical implications concerning which mechanisms explain country-specific outcomes under a shared rule. Another contribution is the creation a new dataset of European Commission assessments of Member State economic programmes and Council of Minister revisions. 

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News

EITM Europe

26 June 2018

EITM Europe 2018 is underway in the beautiful loction of Torino, Italy. The first module on statistics from June 25 until June 27 (and the math refresher from June 23 until June 24) will be taught by James Lo (University of Southern California), the theoretical module from June 28 until June 30 by Thomas Bräuninger (University of Mannheim), the module on machine learning from July 2 until July 4 by Nicole Baerg (University of Essex), and the module on social media from July 5 until July 7 by Pablo Barberá (London School of Economics and Political Science).