New IPR Research: February 2025
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This month’s new research from our faculty experts investigates how strategic moderation leads to legislative success and how immigration policies impact family planning. It also looks at how COVID-19 impact statements influence tenure evaluations and how body-camera footage helped test the effectiveness of a police training program.
Policy Discourse and Decision Making
How Strategic Moderation Leads to Legislative Success
While many studies have looked at why bill proposals fail in Congress, much less is known about what makes them succeed. In an IPR working paper, political scientist and IPR associate Alexander Furnas and his colleagues investigate the choices legislators make to gain support for bill proposals. The researchers looked at 1,007 bills introduced across five Congresses from 2007 to 2017, including bills that never came to a vote. They analyzed several factors that tended to lead to bills becoming law, including status-quo location, or the ideological position that the bill proposal targets; how moderate of a position the bill takes; and how far along the bill was in the legislative process. They find that more moderate bills are overall more successful, and that the liberal proposals often target status quo locations on the right while conservative proposals focus more on positions on the ideological left. Furnas and his colleagues conclude that legislators are not becoming more moderate themselves, but are putting forth more moderate bills, in a strategic way to garner more support, even if it's at the expense of their true beliefs. This research offers insights into how lawmakers can improve their chances of advancing legislation and sheds light on a critical step in the creation of new policies.
Education and Human Development
Immigration Policies and Family Planning
Immigration policies are becoming more strict in the U.S. and may shape how people think about their ideal family size—especially those who perceive these policies as a threat. In Population and Development Review, IPR sociologist Julia Behrman and Abigail Weitzman of the University of Texas at Austin explore how different immigration policies across U.S. states affect ideas about family size among Hispanic communities. Using data from 3,977 non-Hispanic White and Hispanic adults collected through the General Social Survey from 2006 to 2018, the researchers link demographic trends and policy data to demonstrate how immigration policies can unintentionally influence family norms. The survey included the question: “What do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have?” The study found that in states with strict immigration policies, Hispanic individuals—especially those assumed to be undocumented—reported larger ideal family sizes. In states with omnibus policies, which combine multiple restrictive laws, Hispanic adults reported an average ideal family size of 3.16 children, compared to 2.56 among White adults. In states without strict immigration policies, Hispanic adults’ ideal family size dropped to 2.62, closely aligning with White adults at 2.49. States with sanctuary policies did not show significant differences between ideal family sizes of Hispanic and non-Hispanic adults. The researchers suggest that restrictive policies may lead Hispanic individuals to seek comfort in larger families, helping them cope with potential deportations and the loss of loved ones. The findings reveal how immigration policies, even those unrelated to family planning, can influence cultural norms and family dynamics.
Poverty, Race, and Inequality
How Do COVID-19 Impact Statements Influence Tenure Evaluations?
Research has shown that employers are biased against candidates with career disruptions, especially those related to caregiving, which can disproportionately impact women. The COVID-19 pandemic was a major career disruption for many, especially those with caregiving responsibilities. In a study published in Sociological Science, IPR associate Lauren Rivera, IPR fellow Kate Weisshaar, and András Tilcsik of the University of Toronto investigate the effects of COVID-19 impact statements—documents explaining how COVID-19 affected individual careers—on the tenure evaluations of university faculty. Their study involved 602 tenured faculty members in STEM fields from 35 of the 100 top-ranking research universities in the United States. The faculty were randomly assigned to review a candidate in one of three conditions—no COVID-19 impact statement, an impact statement about lab closure, or an impact statement about childcare closure—and were assigned either a male or female candidate. Participants were asked to evaluate the tenure case as if they were on the evaluation committee and rate the candidates on several criteria, including whether they should be given tenure, their estimated current and future productivity, their commitment relative to similar faculty members, and how strongly the participant would advocate for the candidate’s promotion if the evaluation committee disagreed. The results revealed that COVID-19 impact statements led to more favorable tenure evaluations regardless of the reason for work disruption or gender of the candidate. The researchers suggest that narrative interventions that explain career disruptions, like COVID-19 impact statements, are helpful in contextualizing performance and may contribute to more equitable promotion decisions.
Neighborhoods and Community Safety
Using Body-Camera Footage to Test the Effectiveness of a Police Training Program
Video footage has long been used to shed light on police interactions with the public, and over the last decade, many police departments have adopted body-camera footage as a way to hold officers accountable for their behavior. In a study published in PNAS Nexus, IPR computational linguist Rob Voigt and his colleagues analyzed police officer body-camera footage before and after a training program to find out whether the program was effective. The training, conducted with police officers in Oakland, California, focused on communicating respectfully with people pulled over in traffic stops. The program recommended that officers take five concrete actions during traffic stops: begin with a greeting and introduction, state the reason for the stop early, express concern for the driver’s safety, reassure the driver, and use formal rather than informal titles. Using natural language processing tools, the researchers analyzed transcripts of traffic stops made by 122 officers, with an average of five stops per officer, four weeks before and four weeks after the training program. The results showed that officers were more respectful to drivers after going through the program and used more of the behaviors they learned in the training, increasing from an average of three actions per interaction to 3.4. These findings demonstrate how body-camera footage can be a helpful tool to study the effectiveness of efforts to improve police officers’ interactions with the public.
Photo credit: Unsplash
Published: February 10, 2025.
