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Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is \"what the judge ate for breakfast\" in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges. We record the judges' two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct \"decision sessions.\" We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from [almost equal to]65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to [almost equal to]65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.

Contemporary political ills at the mass behavior level (e.g., outgroup aggression, conspiracy theories) are often attributed to increasing polarization and partisan tribalism. We theorize that many such problems are less the product of left-right orientations than an orthogonal \"anti-establishment\" dimension of opinion dominated by conspiracy, populist, and Manichean orientations. Using two national surveys from 2019 and 2020, we find that this dimension of opinion is correlated with several antisocial psychological traits, the acceptance of political violence, and time spent on extremist social media platforms. It is also related to support for populist candidates, such as Trump and Sanders, and beliefs in misinformation and conspiracy theories. While many inherently view politics as a conflict between left and right, others see it as a battle between \"the people\" and a corrupt establishment. Our findings demonstrate an urgent need to expand the traditional conceptualization of mass opinion beyond familiar left-right identities and affective orientations.

Conventional wisdom says that individuals' ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policymaking as conservative, moderate, and even liberal. We argue that subjective ideological disagreement—incongruence between one's ideological preferences and one's perception of the Court's ideological tenor—must be accounted for when explaining legitimacy. Analysis of a national survey shows that subjective ideological disagreement exhibits a potent, deleterious impact on legitimacy. Ideology exhibits sensible connections to legitimacy depending on how people perceive the Court's ideological tenor. Results from a survey experiment support our posited mechanism. Our work has implications for the public's view of the Court as a \"political\" institution.

Bartels and Johnston have recently presented evidence suggesting that the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court is grounded in the ideological preferences and perceptions of the American people. In addition, they offer experimental data purporting to show that dissatisfaction with a single Court decision substantially diminishes the institution's legitimacy. These findings strongly break with earlier research on the Court's institutional support, as the authors recognize. The theoretical implications of their findings are profound. If the authors are correct that legitimacy is strongly dependent upon satisfying the policy preferences and ideological predilections of the American people, the essence of legitimacy is fundamentally transformed. Consequently, we reinvestigate the relationships among ideology, performance satisfaction, and Court legitimacy, unearthing empirical findings that diverge markedly from theirs. We conclude with some thoughts about how the Court's \"countermajoritarian dilemma\" can be reconceptualized and recalculated, once more drawing conclusions sharply at odds with those of Bartels and Johnston.

When the leader of an autocratic regime loses power, one of three things happens. The incumbent leadership group is replaced by democratically elected leaders. Someone from the incumbent leadership group replaces him, and the regime persists. Or the incumbent leadership group loses control to a different group that replaces it with a new autocracy. Much scholarship exists on the first kind of transition, but little on transitions from one autocracy to another, though they make up about half of all regime changes. We introduce a new data set that facilitates the investigation of all three kinds of transition. It provides transition information for the 280 autocratic regimes in existence from 1946 to 2010. The data identify how regimes exit power, how much violence occurs during transitions, and whether the regimes that precede and succeed them are autocratic. We explain the data set and show how it differs from currently available data. The new data identify autocratic regime breakdowns regardless of whether the country democratizes, which makes possible the investigation of why the ouster of dictators sometimes leads to democracy but often does not, and many other questions. We present a number of examples to highlight how the new data can be used to explore questions about why dictators start wars and why autocratic breakdown sometimes results in the establishment of a new autocratic regime rather than democratization. We discuss the implications of these findings for the Arab Spring.

Polarization may be the most consistent effect of populism, as it is integral to the logic of constructing populist subjects. This article distinguishes between constitutive, spatial and institutional dimensions of polarization, adopting a cross-regional comparative perspective on different subtypes of populism in Europe, Latin America and the US. It explains why populism typically arises in contexts of low political polarization (the US being a major, if partial, outlier), but has the effect of sharply increasing polarization by constructing an anti-establishment political frontier, politicizing new policy or issue dimensions, and contesting democracy's institutional and procedural norms. Populism places new issues on the political agenda and realigns partisan and electoral competition along new programmatic divides or political cleavages. Its polarizing effects, however, raise the stakes of political competition and intensify conflict over the control of key institutional sites.

Choice models today are ubiquitous across a range of applications in operations and marketing. Real-world implementations of many of these models face the formidable stumbling block of simply identifying the \"right\" model of choice to use. Because models of choice are inherently high-dimensional objects, the typical approach to dealing with this problem is positing, a priori, a parametric model that one believes adequately captures choice behavior. This approach can be substantially suboptimal in scenarios where one cares about using the choice model learned to make fine-grained predictions; one must contend with the risks of mis-specification and overfitting/underfitting. Thus motivated, we visit the following problem: For a \"generic\" model of consumer choice (namely, distributions over preference lists) and a limited amount of data on how consumers actually make decisions (such as marginal information about these distributions), how may one predict revenues from offering a particular assortment of choices? An outcome of our investigation is a nonparametric approach in which the data automatically select the right choice model for revenue predictions. The approach is practical. Using a data set consisting of automobile sales transaction data from a major U.S. automaker, our method demonstrates a 20% improvement in prediction accuracy over state-of-the-art benchmark models; this improvement can translate into a 10% increase in revenues from optimizing the offer set. We also address a number of theoretical issues, among them a qualitative examination of the choice models implicitly learned by the approach. We believe that this paper takes a step toward \"automating\" the crucial task of choice model selection. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.

What are the political consequences of rising household debt in the context of fiscal austerity? I argue that cuts in welfare benefits privatize social obligations as voters address ensuing financial shortfalls by borrowing money. Debt recommodifies individuals and shifts their electoral support from incumbents to opposition and anti-establishment parties by provoking feelings of political neglect, economic vulnerability, and strong emotional responses. I examine this argument by leveraging spatial and temporal variation in the rollout of Universal Credit (UC), a large-scale welfare reform in the United Kingdom. Using fine-grained administrative data on unsecured debt, I demonstrate that fiscal austerity generated an increase in indebtedness, which lowered support for the incumbent Conservatives and strengthened support for Labour and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). I then use individual-level survey data to explore the mechanisms that link debt and political behavior. The results suggest that rising indebtedness increases the political costs of welfare retrenchment and creates new political cleavages.

We study ingroup bias—the preferential treatment of members of one's group—in naturally occurring data, where economically significant allocation decisions are made under a strong non-discriminatory norm. Data come from Israeli small claims courts during 2000—2004, where the assignment of a case to an Arab or Jewish judge is effectively random. We find robust evidence for judicial ingroup bias. Furthermore, this bias is strongly associated with terrorism intensity in the vicinity of the court in the year preceding the ruling. The results are consistent with theory and lab evidence according to which salience of group membership enhances social identification.

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2025 10(3), 877-888 | Article | (Table of Contents) 1. Introduction. – 2. The Guichet Unique Mechanism: Practical functioning and scope of examination. – 3. Key figures and first review after nine months of implementation of the Reform. – 4. Concluding remarks. | (Abstract) The present article offers an insider’s preliminary examination on the implementation of the CJEU Statute Reform on transfer of preliminary ruling jurisdiction to the General Court. First of all, the paper aims to provide certain reminders of the relevant provisions of the Statute of the Court of Justice and the Rules of Procedure introduced by the recent Reform. Furthermore, the paper highlights how the ‘Guichet Unique’ mechanism works in practice by providing insights into the concrete implementation of the provisions governing the partial transfer of preliminary ruling jurisdiction. Finally, the article includes an empirical assessment of the implementation of the Reform in light of the document published by the Court on September 2025. It reports on the number and nature of cases referred to the General Court or, conversely, retained by the Court for the remainder of the proceedings.