Team reasoning gives a simple, coherent, and rational explanation for human cooperative behavior (Bacharach 1999;Sugden 1993). This paper investigates the robustness of team reasoning as an explanation for cooperative behavior, by assessing its long-run viability. We consider an evolutionary game theoretic model in which the population consists of team reasoners and 'conventional' individual reasoners. We find that changes in the ludic environment can affect evolutionary outcomes, and that in many circumstances, team reasoning may thrive, even under conditions that, at first glance, may seem unfavorable. We also pursue several extensions that augment the basic account, and conclude that team reasoning is an evolutionarily viable mechanism with the potential to explain behavior in a range of human interactions.

A rapidly burgeoning literature in judicial politics concerns the variation in elements of writing style such as reading difficulty, cognitive complexity, affective language, and informality in judicial opinions. Some of these studies argue that judges strategically alter their writing style in anticipation of reactions from other actors. Others indicate that writing style is a function of judge characteristics as well as case-related factors. We investigate the correlates of writing style in US Circuit Courts of Appeals by analyzing a stratified random sample consisting of 11,771 opinions. Construing style broadly to encompass several dimensions suggested by prior work, we find that case and judge characteristics explain substantially more variance in writing style than do strategic considerations.

Political scientists relying on observational data face substantial challenges in drawing causal inferences. A particularly problematic threat to inference is the unobserved confounder. As a means to assess this threat, we introduce simultaneous sensitivity analysis to the political science literature. As an application, we consider the potentially confounded relationship between Supreme Court justice voting and oral argument quality. We demonstrate that this relationship is sensitive to the presence of a confounder, to a degree that threatens inference, and explore the confounder both theoretically and empirically. More generally, we show how sensitivity analysis can guide inquiry related to a covariate that cannot be directly measured.

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This article contributes to the literature addressing family influences on elite political behavior. By empirically assessing the influence of sibling gender on judicial decision-making, we are able to present evidence on the mechanism by which child, sibling and other relatives’ gender may influence elite political behavior. We build on a published dataset by mining various archival sources to compile data on the gender of judges’ siblings. We find no evidence that male judges’ votes on so-called “women’s issues” (employment discrimination based on gender or pregnancy, reproductive rights/abortion, and Title IX) are affected by whether they have a sister, and we are able to rule out large effects of a sibling’s gender on male and female judges’ votes. Our results imply that the relationship between family member gender and elite political behavior is driven by the desire to avoid costs of discrimination, rather than learning from family members.