Douglas Rice

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Papers

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i-10 index

Research Trends

Author Order

Document Type

Co-Authors

Christopher Zorn

Pennsylvania State University

Jesse H. Rhodes

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Tatishe Nteta

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Brendan O’Connor

North Carolina State University

Greg Goelzhauser

Utah State University

Benjamin J. Kassow

University of North Dakota

Katherine A. Keith

Williams College

Saba Siddiki

Syracuse University

Paul M. Collins

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Seth Frey

University of California, Davis

Cooperative Institutions

University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of South Carolina

University of California, Davis

University of California, San Diego

RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Mongolia International University

University of North Texas

Syracuse University

Amherst College

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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"Let Me Just Interrupt You": Estimating Gender Effects in Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Erica Cai Ankita Gupta Katherine Keith Brendan O’Connor Douglas Rice

Oral argument is the most public and visible part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision-making process. Yet what if some advocates are treated differently be- fore the Court solely because of aspects of their identity? In this work, we leverage a causal inference framework to quantify the effect of an advocate’s gender on interruptions of advocates at both the Court-level and the justice-level. Exam- ining nearly four decades of U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcript data, we identify a clear and consistent gender effect that dwarfs other influences on justice interruption behavior, with female advocates interrupted more frequently than male advocates.

Argument (complex analysis)

10.31235/osf.io/4dngy

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Replication Data for: Measuring the Issue Content of Supreme Court Opinions stmOutput-50topics-01062018.RData

Harvard Dataverse (2019)

Douglas Rice

:unav

Replication

Content (measure theory)

10.7910/dvn/yflr9w/l4iinb

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5.1 The Language of Newspaper Coverage of the US Supreme Court

Douglas Rice

Source

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Replication Data for: "Corpus-Based Dictionaries for Sentiment Analysis of Specialized Vocabularies"

Harvard Dataverse (2019)

Douglas Rice Christopher Zorn

Contemporary dictionary-based approaches to sentiment analysis exhibit serious validity problems when applied to specialized vocabularies, but human-coded dictionaries for such applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient to develop. We demonstrate the validity of ``minimally-supervised'' approaches for the creation of a sentiment dictionary from a corpus of text drawn from a specialized vocabulary. We demonstrate the validity of this approach in estimating sentiment from texts in a large-scale benchmarking dataset recently introduced in computational linguistics, and demonstrate the improvements in accuracy of our approach over well-known standard (nonspecialized) sentiment dictionaries. Finally, we show the usefulness of our approach in an application to the specialized language used in U.S. federal appellate court decisions.

Replication

Sentiment Analysis

10.7910/dvn/4ekhfm

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Citations (1)

What To Do About Atheoretic Lags

Political Science Research and Methods (2015)

Skyler Cranmer Douglas Rice Randolph M. Siverson

We examine a problem that is confronted frequently by political science researchers seeking to model longitudinal data: what to do when one suspects a lag between the realization of a regressor and its effect on the outcome variable, but one has no theoretical reason to suspect a particular lag length. We examine the theoretical challenges posed by atheoretic lags, review existing methods for atheoretic lag analysis—most notably distributed lag specifications—and their shortcomings, and present an alternative approach for atheoretic lag analysis based on Bayesian model averaging (BMA). We demonstrate the use and utility of our approach with two examples: the litigant signal model in American politics and modernization theory in political economy. Our examples show the increasing difficulty of analyzing models with atheoretic lags as the set of possible specifications increases, and demonstrate the effectiveness of BMA for the modal type of specification in time-series cross-sectional applications.

Realization (probability)

Suspect

10.1017/psrm.2015.36

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Citations (6)

Measuring the Issue Content of Supreme Court Opinions

Journal of Law and Courts (2019)

Douglas Rice

Abstract The opinions of the US Supreme Court are central to volumes of research on law, courts, and politics. To understand these complex and often-lengthy documents, scholars frequently rely on dichotomous indicators of opinion content. While sometimes appropriate, for many research settings this simplification of opinion content systematically omits important information. Using all US Supreme Court opinions from 1803 to 2010 in association with structural topic models, I instead demonstrate the value of representing the Court’s attention in opinions in terms of topic proportions.

Majority opinion

Concurring opinion

Content (measure theory)

Value (mathematics)

10.1086/701130

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Citations (16)

Replication Data for: "Racial Bias in Legal Language"

Harvard Dataverse (2019)

Douglas Rice

Replication data for Douglas Rice, Jesse Rhodes, and Tatishe Nteta, "Racial Bias in Legal Language", Research Politics (forthcoming). The full replication data could not be uploaded to Dataverse given size limitations. It is available at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1zofclo8zx5oar5/R%26P%20Submission.zip?dl=1 When Dataverse support for large data improves, we will migrate those files here.

Replication

10.7910/dvn/bvcau5

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Legal entrepreneurship and the evolution of multidimensional advocacy in social movements: the case of marriage equality

Law & Society Review (2024)

Christine M. Bailey Paul M. Collins Jesse H. Rhodes Douglas Rice

Abstract The emergence and dissemination of new legal ideas can play an important role in sparking change in the way activists in marginalized communities understand their rights and pursue their objectives. How and why do the legal beliefs of such communities evolve? We argue that the vigorous advocacy of new legal ideas by entrepreneurs and the harnessing of specialized media to help disseminate those ideas are important mechanisms in this evolution. We use the rise of marriage equality as a central legal priority in the mainstream American LGBTQ+ rights movement as a case study to illustrate this phenomenon. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Evan Wolfson’s legal advocacy and an examination of The Advocate , we investigate how Wolfson developed and disseminated legal ideas about same-sex marriage. We show how this advocacy eventually dominated discussion of the issue among elite LGBTQ+ legal actors and the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ publication. However, Wolfson’s advocacy tended to emphasize LGBTQ+ integration into “mainstream” American culture and prioritized the interests and values of relatively privileged subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community. Our research informs our understanding of the interplay between legal advocacy and media reporting in the development of LGBTQ+ rights claims and the strategies adopted to achieve them.

10.1017/lsr.2023.2

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stmOutput-100topics-12082017.RData

Harvard Dataverse (2019)

Douglas Rice

:unav

10.7910/dvn/yflr9w/wsp2mt

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Supreme Court Case Complexity

Harvard Dataverse (2021)

Greg Goelzhauser Benjamin J. Kassow Douglas Rice

Latent measure of U.S. Supreme Court case complexity based on information extracted from litigant briefs (1954-2017).

10.7910/dvn/e1vapx

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