Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House Republican caucus. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party's factional structure. Based on the distribution of interest‐group support from 2001 to 2012, we detect three Republican factions that we characterize as worker oriented, pro‐business, and ethno‐radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the worker and ethno‐radical subgroups and that they advance bills by members in the corporate faction.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires tech giants to identify and remove apps from their platforms that use deceitful sales tactics or violate user privacy. Tech giants have often resisted FTC orders because policing diminishes their profits. But while some firms have eventually complied with FTC demands, other firms have continued to shirk enforcement at the risk of escalating fines. What accounts for these different responses? Examining Apple, Google and Facebook, we find that tech giants willingly police consumer fraud but not consumer privacy violations. Failures to police fraud have led to public complaints and negative press attention, while failures to police data breaches often go undetected by users, the media and thus the FTC. We conclude that tech giants can act as effective regulatory agents on the government's behalf, but only when they police activities they cannot conceal.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.