Journal articles.
Expanding Your Vocabulary: A Framework for Topic Integration in Texts
Topic discovery and integration are vital for maintaining vocabularies that categorize textual corpora. Automated approaches are often computationally expensive and lack domain-specific conceptual nuance; manual approaches are costly in terms of time and potential bias. To address this dilemma, we introduce the segments-as-topic (SAT) methodology, a four-stage process that combines automation and human expertise to assess candidate topics for vocabulary inclusion. In the SAT generation stage, a topic is formulated and refined through collaboration with domain experts, then a sentence-level semantic similarity model retrieves corpus segments semantically aligned with the topic. The SAT expansion stage uses this seed set to find additional semantically similar segments, which are iteratively accepted or rejected to build a final segment set. During the review stage, a panel of scholars evaluates the topic for inclusion. In the integration stage, all segments in the final segment set are automatically tagged with the new topic. We apply this methodology to the Comparative Constitutions Project vocabulary that tracks over 330 topics in national constitutions, and demonstrate the addition of three new topics to the vocabulary. The SAT approach balances computational efficiency with expert judgment, offering a systematic, user-friendly, and replicable framework for social scientists to expand domain-specific vocabularies.
From Citizen Input to Elite Legitimation: The Logic of Will-Confirmation in Constitution-Making
Constitution-making is cast as a state-society dialogue, with public consultation sustaining the legal fiction that “the people” write the social contract. I introduce will-confirmation—the interpretive practice whereby elites utilize underdetermined public input to legitimate representative claims. It has two modes: constructive (synthesizing ambiguous input into alignment) and dismissive (excluding contrary input as unrepresentative). Across thirty-seven interviews from Chile’s Constitutional Convention and Cuba’s Drafting Commission, I show how will-confirmation operates amid crises of representation. In Chile, drafters claiming to embody the people produced parallel monologues, aggravating rather than resolving a lack of elite consensus. In Cuba, drafters and regime-loyal intermediaries filtered input into centralized coherence, obscuring rather than remedying the absence of ideological pluralism. Will-confirmation reduced consultation to self-legitimation rather than a check on interpretation.
Deportation by Design: How Political Entrepreneurs Engineered Crime-Based Deportation in the United States
Starting in the 1980s, the United States federal government considerably expanded criminal grounds for the removal of non-citizens, laying the foundation for today’s deportation regime. The reasons for, and the timing of, the entrenchment of crime-based deportation remain unclear, however, considering the country’s long history of using criminality to exclude, detain, and deport immigrants. I contend that crime-based deportation, as a core institution of modern immigration enforcement, can be traced back to an understudied section of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 and two key reforms in 1988 and 1990. I use a “reactive sequences” approach to examine the macroscopic forces that converged to produce a contingent event—the insertion of Section 701 into IRCA—and two subsequent episodes that transformed the scale and arrangement of crime-based deportation through today. To bolster my argument, I uncover discursive evidence in the Congressional Record across three instances of reform in 1986, 1988, and 1990. A bipartisan coalition of political entrepreneurs consolidated modest policy innovations into the foundation of crime-based deportation, presenting these changes as a logical extension of the ongoing institutional crackdown on drugs and crime. Substantively, these findings contribute to historical research on how deportation laws have changed through the policymaking process. Theoretically, I apply the reactive sequences approach to a novel case study, clarifying how human agency contributes to certain processes of institutional transformation.
Consultation Without Consensus: Lessons from the Chilean Constitutional Convention (2021-2022)
Constitutional crises increasingly emerge not from dictatorship’s end, but from democracy’s disappointments, generating demands for greater citizen involvement. Drawing on interviews with 30 delegates and staff from the Chilean Constitutional Convention, this research note examines why one of history’s most ambitious participatory experiments faltered. The analysis reveals three interconnected tensions characterizing consultation without consensus: sequencing (when citizen input informs elite deliberation), aggregation (how input becomes actionable), and authority (what binding force participation has over representatives). The Convention attempted extensive citizen engagement without prior elite agreement on these core questions, producing mechanisms that struggled to link citizens to decision-making. The case exposes a paradox: the conditions making consultation most necessary—acute fragmentation and representational failure—also make coherent implementation most difficult.
Elite Fractures, Public Capture: The Strategic Use of Public Consultation in Global Constitution-Making
Since 1974, two out of every five constitutions (40.3%) were prepared via processes that included public consultation. The reasons for adopting these participatory mechanisms, however, are largely unexplored. I argue that public consultation is a tool for elite contestation of power. Introducing an original dataset of public consultations in constitution-making processes from 1974-2021 (n = 300), I find that in democracies, factional majorities and newcomer elites use public consultation to legitimate a break from the status quo. In autocracies, governing coalitions that depend on performance and enjoy greater party institutionalization push for public consultation to preserve favorable power-sharing arrangements.
Measuring constitutional preferences: A new method for analyzing public consultation data
Public consultation has become an indispensable part of constitutional design, yet the voluminous, narrative data produced are often impractical to analyze. There are also few, if any, standards for such analysis. Using a comprehensive reference ontology from the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP), we develop a new methodology to identify constitutional topics of most concern to citizens and compare these to topics in constitutions globally. We analyze data from Chile’s 2016 public consultations—an ambitious process that produced nearly 265,000 narrative responses and launched the constitutional reform process that remains underway today. We leverage advances in natural language processing, in particular sentence-level semantic similarity technology, to classify consultation responses with respect to constitutional topics. Our methodology has potential for advocates, drafters, and researchers seeking to analyze public consultation data that too often go unexamined.
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Works in progress.
Constitutional Cherry-Picking: Constructing 'The People' in Participatory Constitution-Making
How do drafters leverage public consultation during constitution-making? Research focuses on participation’s downstream effects, sidestepping elite deliberations where the will of “the people” takes shape. I argue that drafters engage in cherry-picking, selectively invoking consultation inputs and procedures to elevate supportive and discredit contrary evidence. Through this mode of representative claim-making, these elites do not transmit citizen preferences but characterize them to fit their constitutional positions. Using an LLM-assisted pipeline, I classify consultation invocations in plenary transcripts from Chile (2021–22) and Cuba (2018–19), identifying two modes distinguished by interpretive control of the consultation record. In Chile’s contested mode, the supermajority invoked consultation to underwrite reforms while the opposition attacked its design. In Cuba’s concentrated mode, the Drafting Commission invoked consultation to validate decisions already made while dominating the floor. Cherry-picking makes visible what constituent power theory often conceals — that drafters represent a public whose will they partly construct.
When Experience Meets Environment: Professional Backgrounds, Court Composition, and Decision-Making in Immigration Court
Research on judicial behavior has long recognized that professional backgrounds shape decision-making, but often treats these effects as uniform across institutional contexts. Focusing on U.S. immigration courts, we argue that understanding how professional experience influences judges requires attention to the specificity of prior socialization and the courts where judges currently sit. Analyzing more than 520,000 decisions by 502 immigration judges from 2015–2018, we disaggregate backgrounds by domain and examine how court composition moderates individual effects. Immigration-specific experience matters: former ICE attorneys grant relief at lower rates than other prosecutors; nonprofit immigration defense attorneys grant at higher rates than other defense attorneys. These background effects, however, are conditional on context — they are most pronounced in professionally heterogeneous courts and attenuate in prosecutor-dominated courts, where local norms absorb or suppress prior socialization. Professional background shapes judicial heuristics, but institutional environment determines whether those heuristics distinguish judges from their peers.
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Other works.
Translation
Chile 2023 — Draft of 30 Oct 2023
Translation of the Chilean constitutional proposal