A growing theoretical literature identifies how the process of constitutional review shapes judicial decision-making, legislative behavior, and even the constitutionality of legislation and executive actions. However, the empirical interrogation of these theoretical arguments is limited by the absence of a common protocol for coding constitutional review decisions across courts and time. We introduce such a coding protocol and database (CompLaw) of rulings by 42 constitutional courts. To illustrate the value of CompLaw, we examine a heretofore untested empirical implication about how review timing relates to rulings of unconstitutionality (Ward and Gabel 2019). First, we conduct a nuanced analysis of rulings by the French Constitutional Council over a 13-year period. We then examine the relationship between review timing and strike rates with a set of national constitutional courts in one year. Our data analysis highlights the benefits and flexibility of the CompLaw coding protocol for scholars of judicial review.

@article{gabelCarrubbaHelmkeMartinStatonWardZiegler2024,
  title={CompLaw: A Coding Protocol and Database for the Comparative Study of Judicial Review},
  author={Gabel, Matthew and Carrubba, Clifford J and Helmke, Gretchen and Martin, Andrew D and Staton, Jeffrey K and Ward, Dalston and Ziegler, Jeffrey},
  journal={Journal of Law and Courts},
  pages={1--27},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Cambridge University Press}
}

Conjoint experiments are often used to mimic political choices that people face, such as voting for public officials or selecting news stories. Conjoint designs, however, do not always mirror the real-world decision-making contexts that individuals engage in because respondents are typically forced to select one of the available options. Theoretically, we illustrate how offering respondents an abstention option can produce average marginal component effects (AMCEs) of differing signs and magnitudes relative to a forced-choice outcome. This difference depends on 1) the proportion of respondents who would rather abstain than select profiles lacking their preferred attribute-levels, and 2) those respondents’ preference orderings. Empirically, we replicate two conjoint experiments and demonstrate how omitting a realistic abstention option could lead to different AMCE estimates.

@article{millerZiegler2024,
  title={Preferential Abstention in Conjoint Experiments},
  author={Miller, David R. and Ziegler, Jeffrey},
  journal={Research and Politics},
	volume={11},
	issue={4},	
  pages={1--8},
  year={2024},
}

Are centralized leaders of religious organizations responsive to their followers' political preferences over time even when formal accountability mechanisms, such as elections, are weak or absent? I argue that such leaders have incentives to be responsive because they rely on dedicated members for legitimacy and support. I test this theory by examining the Catholic Church and its centralized leader, the Pope. First, I analyze over 10,000 papal statements to confirm that the papacy is responsive to Catholics' overall political concerns. Second, I conduct survey experiments in Brazil and Mexico to investigate how Catholics react to responsiveness. Catholics increase their organizational trust and participation when they receive papal messages that reflect their concerns, conditional on their existing commitment to the Church and their agreement with the Church on political issues. The evidence suggests that in religious organizations, centralized leaders reaffirm members' political interests because followers support religious organizations that are politically responsive.

@article{ziegler2024,
  title={Political Responsiveness and Centralized Religious Leaders: Lessons from the Catholic Church},
  author={Ziegler, Jeffrey},
  journal={Politics and Religion},
	volume={17},
	issue={2},
	pages={250-275},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Cambridge University Press}
}

Introduction: In the context of clinical care, discussions concerning culture are important for providing inclusive and culturally responsive evidence-based treatments. The present study contributes to training and educating anti-racist psychologists by exploring a teaching strategy aimed at actively changing behaviors that may hinder rapport and therapeutic efficacy for clients of underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds. Drawing upon an extensively researched clinical intervention for the treatment of anxiety and fear—exposure therapy—the study explored the feasibility and acceptability of an exposure-based teaching strategy that intervenes on anxiety and avoidance behavior around multicultural discussions with clients.

Methods: A 2-arm randomized controlled pilot study was conducted with graduate trainees in clinical psychology or counseling to compare an interactive exposure-based workshop (IEB; n = 19) involving repeated simulated client interactions focused on cultural factors to a training-as-usual workshop (TAU; n = 16) involving an instructional video on the topic. Pre- and post-intervention simulated client interactions focusing on multicultural dialogue were used to assess the specific variables of interest. Trainee feedback was obtained post-intervention.

Results: IEB workshop attendees rated the workshop as more useful and reported they were more likely to recommend the workshop to a peer as compared TAU workshop attendees. Trainee feedback highlights the utility and desire for practice opportunities with client actors and opportunities for constructive feedback.

Conclusions: Findings provide initial support for the acceptability and feasibility of an exposure-based clinical training to challenge avoidance behaviors and increase engagement in discussions around cultural factors with clients.

@article{jacquartPinkstonZieglerSbarraOConnor2024,
   title={Improving culturally responsive clinical training: Exploring the acceptability and feasibility of an exposure-based strategy.},
  author={Jacquart, Jolene and Wardle-Pinkston, Sophie and Ziegler, Jeffrey and Sbarra, David A and O'Connor, Mary-Frances},
  journal={Training and Education in Professional Psychology},
  year={2024},
 volume={18},
  number={1},
 pages={87-97},
  publisher={Educational Publishing Foundation}
}

Numerous cross-sectional studies confirm the long-theorized association between mothers’ depression and lower parenting self-efficacy (PSE) beliefs. However, cross-sectional studies leave unanswered the direction of this association: Does depression predict PSE? Does PSE predict depression? Are both true? Does the strength of the association between depression and PSE, regardless of the direction, generalize across participant characteristics and study design features? How stable is PSE over time? And how effective are interventions at enhancing PSE? To answer these questions, we conducted a meta-analytic review of longitudinal studies. With 35 eligible studies (22,698 participants), we found support for both models: there was a significant pooled effect of both depression on PSE and of PSE on depression, with nearly identical effect sizes (d = −0.21 and −0.22, respectively). The association was stronger in samples with mothers’ younger average age and studies that measured PSE among mothers relative to during pregnancy. We found a medium degree of stability in the index of PSE, d = 0.60. Finally, the estimated pooled effect size between being in an intervention group versus control group and PSE was 0.505. Overall, we found support for (1) bidirectional associations between depression and PSE in mothers, (2) the stability of PSE over time, and (3) the strength of the relationship between PSE and depression with intervention. These results suggest the importance of continuing to develop, test, and disseminate interventions to enhance PSE. We interpret these findings in the context of both depression and low PSE having serious consequences for child outcomes and maladaptive parenting.

@article{goodmanSimonMcCarthyZieglerCeballos2022,
  title={Testing Models of Associations Between Depression and Parenting Self-efficacy in Mothers: A Meta-analytic Review},
  author={Goodman, Sherryl H and Simon, Hannah and McCarthy, Luke and Ziegler, Jeffrey and Ceballos, Alex},
  journal={Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review},
  volume={25},
  number={3},
  pages={471--499},
  year={2022},
  publisher={Springer}
}

Participants that complete online surveys and experiments may be inattentive, which can hinder researchers’ ability to draw substantive or causal inferences. As such, many practitioners include multiple factual or instructional closed-ended manipulation checks to identify low-attention respondents. However, closed-ended manipulation checks are either correct or incorrect, which allows participants to more easily guess and it reduces the potential variation in attention between respondents. In response to these shortcomings, I develop an automatic and standardized methodology to measure attention that relies on the text that respondents provide in an open-ended manipulation check. There are multiple benefits to this approach. First, it provides a continuous measure of attention, which allows for greater variation between respondents. Second, it reduces the reliance on subjective, paid humans to analyze open-ended responses. Last, I outline how to diagnose the impact of inattentive workers on the overall results, including how to assess the average treatment effect of those respondents that likely received the treatment. I provide easy-to-use software in R to implement these suggestions for open-ended manipulation checks.

@article{ziegler2022,
  title={A Text-As-Data Approach for Using Open-Ended Responses as Manipulation Checks},
  author={Ziegler, Jeffrey},
  journal={Political Analysis},
  volume={30},
  number={2},
  pages={289--297},
  year={2022},
  publisher={Cambridge University Press}
}

Democracies are thought to violate treaties less frequently than non-democracies, yet democracies violate bilateral investment treaties (BITs) more often. Though democratic governments may intend to meet their international obligations, and though democratic institutions provide greater political constraints to encourage compliance, investment agreements may conflict with the goal of maintaining domestic public support. Specifically, we argue that credible elections create strong incentives for governments to side with domestic voters over foreign business interests, and to pass legislation that violates investment agreements. We use a data set of BIT violation complaints that better captures potential indirect expropriation to confirm prior findings that show a difference in violations by regime type. Importantly, however, governments are only more likely to violate BITs as credible elections approach. The results suggest that the ability of voters to sanction leaders is an important mechanism that incentivizes governments to potentially violate investment treaties through indirect expropriation.

@article{carlsonZiegler2021,
  title={The Role of Democratic Governance and Indirect Expropriation in International Investment Treaty Violations},
  author={Carlson, David and Ziegler, Jeffrey},
  journal={Uluslararas{\i} {\.I}li{\c{s}}kiler Dergisi},
  volume={18},
  number={72},
  pages={37--49},
  year={2021}
}

One of the more important innovations in the study of how citizens assess the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideological updating model, which assumes that citizens grant legitimacy to the institution according to the perceived distance between themselves and the Court on a unidimensional ideological (liberal–conservative) continuum. Under this model, citizens are also said to update this calculation with every new salient Supreme Court decision. The model’s requirements, however, do not seem to square with the long-established view that Americans are largely innocent of ideology. Here, we conduct an audit of the model’s mechanisms using a series of empirical tests applied to a nationally representative sample. Our general conclusion is that the ideological updating model, especially when supplemented with the requirement that citizens must become aware of Court decisions, simply does not square with the realities of American politics. Students of Supreme Court legitimacy may therefore want to search for other theories of legitimacy updating.

@article{gibsonPereiraZiegler2017,
  title={Updating Supreme Court Legitimacy: Testing the “Rule, Learn, Update” Model of Political Communication},
  author={Gibson, James L. and Pereira, Miguel M. and Ziegler, Jeffrey},
  journal={American Politics Research},
  volume={45},
  number={6},
  pages={980--1002},
  year={2017},
}

Social science researchers frequently need to analyze time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) data. Yet, there are well-known problems that make inferences particularly difficult, including: serial correlation in the variables of interest across time, between-subject heterogeneity in baselines and temporal trends, as well as unbalanced panels. In these circumstances, both parameter estimates and their standard errors can be misleading and biased when inappropriately modeled. We offer a modeling strategy that is appropriate even when the panel is unbalanced utilizing Gaussian process regression (GPR). GPR offers the simplicity of standard inferential techniques while handling complex underlying data-generation. GPR is particularly useful for applications in which we doubt the assumptions of conditional independence, and when we do not know or do not want to assume a specific error structure associated with this non-independence. Importantly, we show GPR surpasses previous alternatives on many criteria across a range of commonly encountered situations with TSCS data.

Research assessing judges' political preferences typically focuses on courts that publish individual votes and opinions, yet many courts issue per curiam judgments that do not permit public dissent. To overcome this limitation, we use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to model the variation in judges' expressed preferences from language in aggregated judgments. Specifically, we apply CNNs to analyze the written judgments of judges-rapporteur and opinions of advocates-general from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Along a pro/anti-EU dimension, we estimate how judgments differ within (1) each case to the advocate-general's opinion, providing a baseline for the case's legal merits, and (2) each judge-rapporteur, which measures how judges alter their writing across cases. Our results provide novel empirical support for theoretic models of European judicial decision-making: more pro-EU opinions driven by the Court, not the advocates-general or judge-rapporteur, are associated with larger chambers and stronger external signals of compliance.

Research shows that judges express their underlying political preferences when speaking that can only be captured with audio and not text. Yet, it is unclear if audio recordings are more nor less detrimental to courts’ legitimacy than written transcripts. First, using a nationally representative sample of Americans, we show that when individuals read the written transcripts from a case they are not more likely to grant the U.S. Supreme Court legitimacy than individuals that hear the same dialogue. Second, we show among a nationally representative sample in the UK that Brits are not more or less likely to believe the nation’s high court is legitimate when they read, hear, or watch the proceedings. We highlight that the results are not driven by the emotions that judges convey, the perceived political bias of judges’, or participants’ political preferences. The findings have important implications for how national high courts communicate their decisions.

Accompanying R package for "A Text-As-Data Approach for Using Open-Ended Responses as Manipulation Checks" to help researchers analyze manipulation checks that employ open-ended responses.