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Gabel, Matthew
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
| Office: |
Seigle 290 |
| Phone: |
(314) 935-6613 |
| Fax: |
(314) 935-5856 |
| Web: |
information unavailable |
| Email: |
mgabel@artsci.wustl.edu |
| Office Hours: |
by appointment |
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Curriculum Vitae:
cv09.pdf
Keywords:
European integration, comparative political behavior, comparative democratic processes, legislative voting behavior, judicial politics and medical decision-making
Biographical:
Matt Gabel joined the department in Fall 2006 as an Associate Professor. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Rochester in 1994. He also completed a Masters Degree in Advanced European Studies at the College of Europe in Brugge, Belgium. He spent 1996-1998 at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research.
Current Couses:
- The Politics of the European Union - syllabus
- Approaches to Comparative Politics (510) - syllabus
Working Papers:
- Judicial Behavior under Politcial Constraints
Clifford Carrubba, Matthew Gabel, and Charles Hankla
American Political Science Review, 2008
Abstract: The actual impact of judicial decisions often depends on the behavior of executive and legislative bodies that implement the rulings. Consequently, when a court hears a case involving the interests of those controlling the executive and legislative institutions, those interests can threaten to obstruct the court’s intended outcome. In this paper, we evaluate whether and to what extent such constraints shape judicial rulings. Specifically, we examine how threats of non-compliance and legislative over-ride influence decisions by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Based on a statistical analysis of a novel dataset of ECJ rulings, we find that the preferences of member-state governments—whose interests are central to threats of non-compliance and over-ride—have a systematic and substantively important impact on ECJ decisions.
view paper
- Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables
Matthew Gabel and Kenneth Scheve
American Journal of Political Science, 2007
Abstract: A central question in the study of democratic polities is the extent to which elite opinions about public policy shapes and potentially manipulates public opinion on those issues. Estimating the impact of elites on mass opinion is difficult because of endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement error. This paper proposes an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect of elite messages on public support for European integration employing changes in political institutions as instrumental variables. The paper presents three main empirical results. Frist, we find that more negative elite messages about European integration do indeed decrease public support for Europe. Our analysis suggests that OLS estimates are biased, underestimating the magnitude of the effect of elite messages by fifty percent. Second, we find no evidence that this effect of elite messages vareis for more political aware individuals. Thirid, our estimates are inconsistent with a mainstreaming effect in which political awareness increases support for Europe in those political settings in which elites have a favorable consensus on the benefits of integration. This result is in sharp contrast to the OLS analysis that incorrectly suggests a mainstreaming effect.
view paper
- Mixed Messages: Party Dissent and Mass Opinion on European Integration
Matthew Gabel and Kenneth Scheve
European Union Politics, 2007
Mass opposition to Europe may stem from mainstream as well as formally Euroskeptic parties. Large parties in the member states of the European Union (EU) tend to combine support for Europe with a high level of intra-party dissent over the issue. Thus, these parties provide heterogeneous yet potentially influential signals about European integration to their supporters. In this paper, we examine the effect of intra-party dissent on the opinion of party supporters. Our estimation of this relationship explicitly addresses the issues of endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement problems endemic to this empirical study of elite effects on mass opinion. Specifically, we use variation in the centralization of candidate selection rules as an instrumental variable for intra-party dissent. We find substantial evidence that intra-party dissent does indeed increase variation in support for integration among party supporters. With common levels of intra-party dissent, even pro-EU parties can cause a substantial portion of their supporters to adopt anti-EU opinions.
view paper
- Legislative Voting Behavior, Seen and Unseen: A Theory of Roll-Call Vote Selection
Clifford Carrubba, Matthew Gabel, and Simon Hug
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2008
The empirical study of legislative behavior largely relies on roll-call vote analysis, but roll-call votes in many legislatures represent only a sample of legislative votes. We have good reasons to believe this sample is particularly poor for inferring party effects on legislative behavior. The selection of votes for roll call may be endogenous to exactly the characteristics of voting behavior (for instance, party cohesion) that we want to study. We must understand the roll-call vote institution and account for its selection effects before we can draw inferences about legislative behavior from roll-call vote results. This article develops a game-theoretic model of roll-call vote requests predicated on party leaders requesting votes to enforce party discipline. The model offers general and testable predictions about the selection process and how it affects observed and unobserved legislative behavior, particularly party cohesion.
view paper
- Voting at the surface: Roll call votes in the European Parliament
Clifford Carrubba, Matthew Gabel, and Simon Hug
view paper
- The Politics of Decision-Making in the European Court of Justice: The System of Chamber and the Distribution of Cases for Decision
Matthew Gabel
view paper
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