Jane Sumner, Ph.D.
jlsumner@umn.edu
Assistant Professor
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
I study political economy and quantitative methodology. My primary areas of expertise are the politics of business investment (foreign direct investment, but also domestic investment) and public opinion about trade, globalization, and offshoring. I am currently writing a book about corporate political influence. My methodological interests are chiefly data collection amd measurement. I also dabble in studying the role of gender in the discipline. I am the developer of the Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT) and I have done research on gendered citation patterns and gendered research topics.
Research Interests
Political Economy
Research Methods & Research Design
Comparative Political Institutions
Globalization
Measurement
Public Opinion
My Research:
I study political economy and research methods. Most of my research focuses on business and politics, with a particular focus on the role of public opinion. Many of my articles try to understand how people feel about economic globalization. My book manuscript, The Cost of Doing Politics, asks how public opinion shapes corporate influence tactics.
My methodology work is primarily focused on measurement and data collection in an effort to help more researchers answer more questions in more areas, especially in local politics. I also do research that aims to understand how demographic characteristics of researchers affect the research we do.
Co-authored with Mirya Holman and Emily Farris. The adage “All politics is local” in the United States is largely true. Of the United States’ 90,106 governments, 99.9% are local governments. Despite variations in institutional features, descriptive representation, and policy-making power, political scientists have been slow to take advantage of these variations. One obstacle is that comprehensive data on local politics is often extremely difficult to obtain; as a result, data is unavailable or costly, hard to replicate, and rarely updated. We provide an alternative: crowdsourcing this data. We demonstrate and validate crowdsourcing data on local politics using two different data collection projects. We evaluate different measures of consensus across coders and validate the crowd’s work against elite and professional datasets. In doing so, we show that crowdsourced data is both highly accurate and easy to use. In doing so, we demonstrate that nonexperts can be used to collect, validate, or update local data.
Co-authored with Jennifer Gandhi. Dictators come to power with the support of elites who are also capable of removing them from power. If autocrats successfully navigate this critical period, they are more likely to survive in power with time. Yet their persistence in office alone does not reveal how they have managed to survive. Survival in power is the result of two distinct arrangements. In one, power remains balanced between the leader and the elite, and in the other, leaders are able to marginalize their supporting elites, enabling them to concentrate power. To determine whether power is shared or consolidated, we must look more directly at the behavior of dictators: their actions toward personnel and institutions that can shift the balance of power between themselves and elites. We use an item response model to produce a time series cross-sectional measure of the leader’s concentration of power for all nondemocracies from 1946 to 2008.
Co-authored with Mirya Holman and Emily Farris. In the United States, the federal government's slow response to the COVID-19 pandemic and localized instances of outbreaks devolved initial policy responses to state and local governments. But not all local governments reacted in equal measure. Was a delayed response in cities due simply to timing of infections, or did politics and political institutions play a role? We use crowd-sourced data to assess local governments' policy responses to the pandemic amidst escalating cases and a scattershot approach to policymaking. Combining a unique dataset of the presence of local shelter-in-place, business closure, and gathering size policies with data on local COVID cases, ideology, partisanship, and institutional capacity, we find that evidence that federalism, demand, and ideology influence local governments' COVID-19 policy responses.
Co-authored with Florencia Montal and Carly Potz-Nielsen. When negotiating investment treaties, states balance two goals: providing strong protections for investors (investor protection), which is thought to attract foreign direct investment, and maintaining the ability to regulate their economies (regulatory autonomy). In this article we argue that treaty content can tell us about the latent preferences that states have over the level of investor protection enshrined in BITs. We use an item response theory (IRT) model and a dataset of 1,144 treaties to estimate latent preferences on this scale for signatory countries. Our measure is of use to scholars interested in studying bilateral investment treaties, international law, and foreign direct investment, and our model is of use to anyone aiming to estimate latent preferences from jointly produced manifestations.
Co-authored with Andrew Kerner. American consumers are routinely reminded of the fact that the products sold by American companies are often manufactured abroad. We use a survey‐based priming experiment to explore whether and when those reminders depress Americans’ enthusiasm for free trade. We consider in particular that offshoring's effects on policy preferences may be linked to negative perceptions of the offshoring firm, such that portraying the offshoring firm in a positive light might mitigate that effect. We also consider that offshoring's effect may be exaggerated among individuals whose position in the labor market makes them especially sensitive to trade‐related labor market disruption. Our experiment suggests support for both propositions.
Co-authored with Michelle Dion and Sara M. Mitchell. Many studies in political science and other disciplines show that published research by women is cited less often than research by male peers in the same discipline. While previous studies have suggested that self-citation practices may explain the gender citation gap in political science, few studies have evaluated whether men and women self-cite at different rates. Our article examines the relationship between author gender, author experience and seniority, and authors’ decisions to include self-citations using a new dataset that includes all articles published in 22 political science journals between 2007 and 2016. Contrary to our expectations, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that men are more likely cite their previous work than women, whether writing alone or co-authoring with others of the same sex. Mixed gender author teams are significantly less likely to self-cite. We also observe lower rates of self-citation in general field journals and Comparative/International Relations subfield journals. The results imply that the relationship between gender and self-citation depends on several factors such as collaboration and the typical seniority and experience of authors on the team.
Co-authored with Andrew Kerner and Brian Richter. American discontent with offshore production features heavily in trade policy debates. But Americans more typically encounter offshore production in apolitical contexts as consumers. We argue that these ostensibly apolitical encounters with offshore production are, in fact, freighted with political consequences. This paper asks: When and for whom does consumer-based exposure to offshore production reduce support for free trade? This is an important in its own right, but also sheds light on the contexts in which more overtly political references to offshore production are likely to find the most fertile ground. We answer these questions using a survey experiment that embeds an offshoring “prime” into an advertisement for pet furniture, varying the location of production across different treatment groups. We find that our experimental exposure to offshore production depressed enthusiasm for free trade, but only when production occurred in China, and mainly among white men living near trade-related job loss. That heterogeneity resonates with work on the economic and social aspects of the decline in American manufacturing employment.
Co-authored with Adam Lê, Emily M. Farris, and Josephine M. Warmka. Although local government is a rich, important arena for under-standing politics, local politics presents a few challenges for understanding and participating in it. To better explore comparative urban politics, we turn to reddit, a social media, news, and discussion platform. We ask if city subreddits are places of discussion of local politics and what can we learn about the salience of local topics, and about local politics, from the content of these subreddits. Using visualization and text analysis, we find that city subreddits are indeed forums for political discussion, finding that approximately a quarter of the topics on city subreddits are political in nature. We observe that people discuss matters including, but not limited to, taxation, policing and crime, homelessness, and education. We conclude with areas for future study, including, most prominently, the rise of nationalized local politics, such as minimum wage increases and body cameras, increasingly discussed and organized on the national stage.
Co-authored with Ellen Key. Political science, like many disciplines, has a “leaky-pipeline” problem. Women are more likely to leave the profession than men. Those who stay are promoted at lower rates. Recent work has pointed toward a likely culprit: women are less likely to submit work to journals. Why? One answer is that women do not believe their work will be published. This article asks whether women systematically study different topics than men and whether these topics may be less likely to appear in top political science journals. To answer this question, we analyzed the content of dissertation abstracts. We found evidence that some topics are indeed gendered. We also found differences in the representation of “women’s” and “men’s” topics in the pages of the top journals. This suggests that research agendas may indeed be gendered and that variation in research topic might be to blame for the submission gap.
Co-authored with Yilang Feng and Andrew Kerner. Existing research has found that American politicians benefit from trying to attract investment and creates jobs. In this paper, we build on this work by describing the drivers of Americans' attitudes toward inward foreign investment (FDI). We posit that foreign and Chinese investment are different than domestic investment in the public imagination and that nationalism and proximity to deindustrialization interact to shape public opinion about them. We propose and test two theories of this interaction using a survey experiment that randomizes whether a respondent is responding to a statement about “business investment,” “foreign business investment,” or “Chinese business investment”. We find that (1) Americans are skeptical of business investments by Chinese, and, to lesser degree, “foreign” firms; (2) the gap in enthusiasm for generic business investment and foreign/Chinese business investment rises with local trade-related job losses; and (3) the distinction between nationalists' and non-nationalists' attitudes toward FDI declines in local job losses.
Accumulated evidence identifies discernible gender gaps across many dimensions of professional academic careers including salaries, publication rates, journal placement, career progress, and academic service. Recent work in political science also reveals gender gaps in citations, with articles written by men citing work by other male scholars more often than work by female scholars. This study estimates the gender gap in citations across political science subfields and across methodological subfields within political science, sociology, and economics. The research design captures variance across research areas in terms of the underlying distribution of female scholars. We expect that subfields within political science and social science disciplines with more women will have smaller gender citation gaps, a reduction of the “Matthew effect” where men’s research is viewed as the most central and important in a field. However, gender citation gaps may persist if a “Matilda effect” occurs whereby women’s research is viewed as less important or their ideas are attributed to male scholars, even as a field becomes more diverse. Analysing all articles published from 2007–2016 in several journals, we find that female scholars are significantly more likely than mixed gender or male author teams to cite research by their female peers, but that these citation rates vary depending on the overall distribution of women in their field. More gender diverse subfields and disciplines produce smaller gender citation gaps, consistent with a reduction in the “Matthew effect”. However, we also observe undercitation of work by women, even in journals that publish mostly female authors. While improvements in gender diversity in academia increase the visibility and impact of scholarly work by women, implicit biases in citation practices in the social sciences persist.
This article introduces a web-based tool that scholars can use to assess the gender balance of their syllabi and bibliographies. The citation gap in political science is described briefly as well as why under-citing women relative to men is a problem that should be addressed by the field. The Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT) is presented as a way to make assessing gender balance easier with the aim of remedying the gender gap. This is followed by an outline that explains in nontechnical terms how the tool identifies author names and then predicts their gender to produce a single document-level percentage of women authors. Finally, best practices for diversity in syllabi and bibliographies are discussed, and various public sources that can be used to find scholarly work by women, as well as scholars of color, are listed.
When a researcher suspects that the marginal effect of on varies with , a common approach is to plot at different values of along with a pointwise confidence interval generated using the procedure described in Brambor, Clark, and Golder to assess the magnitude and statistical significance of the relationship. Our article makes three contributions. First, we demonstrate that the Brambor, Clark, and Golder approach produces statistically significant findings when at a rate that can be many times larger or smaller than the nominal false positive rate of the test. Second, we introduce the interactionTest software package for R to implement procedures that allow easy control of the false positive rate. Finally, we illustrate our findings by replicating an empirical analysis of the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the number of political parties from Comparative Political Studies.
This article explores whether citizens of city‐regions hold a particular attitude about collective action. We model individual support for the new regionalist idea that communities sharing the same city‐region (i.e., metropolitan area) should share resources across them to solve regional problems. Using data from a random sample survey of adults living in 15 metropolitan areas in the state of Georgia in the United States, we use Bayesian analysis to determine the effects of a set of individual and contextual factors on the attitude. Conventional political cleavages of race, gender, and place of residence produce the strongest effects. We offer a set of theoretical, methodological, and practical implications for future research on political orientations of citizens in city‐regions.
This article argues that the political risk associated with foreign direct investment (FDI) is primarily a function of investment in fixed-capital, and not a homogeneous feature of FDI. As such, empirical tests of a political institution's ability to mitigate political risk should focus directly on investments in fixed capital and not on more highly aggregated measures of multinational corporation (MNC) activity, such as FDI flow and stock data that are affected by the accumulation of liquid assets in foreign affiliates. We apply this to the study of bilateral investment treaties (BITs). We find that BITs with the United States correlate positively with investments in fixed capital and have little, if any, correlation with other measures of MNC activity.
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