Person: Greiner, James
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Greiner, James
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Publication R X C Ecological Inference: Bounds, Correlations, Flexibility, and Transparency of Assumptions(Royal Statistical Society, 2009) Greiner, James; Quinn, KevinDespite its potential pitfalls, ecological inference is an unavoidable part of some quantitative settings, including US voting rights litigation. In such applications, the analyst will typically encounter two-way tables with more than two rows and columns. Although several ecological inference methods are currently available for 2×2 tables, there are fewer options for analysing general R×C tables, and virtually none that model counts as opposed to fractions. We propose a count R×C method that respects the bounds deterministically, that allows for complex relationships between internal cell quantities, that is easily extensible and that results from transparent assumptions. We study the method via simulation, and then apply it to an example that is drawn from the state of Texas relevant to recent redistricting litigation there.Publication Causal Inference in Civil Rights Litigation(Harvard University, Harvard Law School, 2008) Greiner, JamesCivil rights litigation often concerns the causal effect of some characteristic on decisions made by a governmental or socioeconomic actor. An analyst may be interested, for example, in the effect of victim race on jury imposition of the death penalty, in the effect of applicant gender on a firm’s hiring decisions, or in the effect of candidate ethnicity on election results. For the past thirty years, such analyses have primarily been accomplished via a statistical technique known as regression. But as it has been used in civil rights litigation, regression suffers from several shortcomings: it facilitates biased, result-oriented thinking by expert witnesses; it encourages judges and litigators to believe that all questions are equally answerable; and it gives the wrong answer in situations in which such might be avoided. These difficulties, and several others, all stem from the fact that regression does not begin with a paradigm for defining causal effects and for drawing causal inferences. This Article argues for a wholesale change in thinking in this area, from a focus on regression coefficients to an explicit framework of causation called “potential outcomes.” The potential outcomes paradigm of causal inference, which (for lawyers) may be analogized to but-for causation with a renewed emphasis on time, addresses many of the shortcomings of regression as the latter is currently used in civil rights litigation, and it does so within a framework courts, litigators, and juries can understand. This Article explains regression and the potential outcomes paradigm and discusses the latter’s application in the death penalty, employment discrimination, and redistricting settings.Publication The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in a Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future(Harvard University, Harvard Law School, 2013) Greiner, James; Pattanayak, Cassandra Wolos; Hennessy, JohnathanWe persuaded entities conducting two legal aid programs designed to provide evidence regarding a civil right to counsel to allow us to randomize which potential clients would receive offers of traditional attorney-client relationships from legal aid provider staff attorneys and which would receive only limited (“unbundled”) assistance. In both pilot programs, potential clients were occupants facing eviction from their housing units, and in neither pilot program did the legal aid provider have capacity sufficient to offer full representation to all occupants who sought it. In this Article, we report the results of one of the two randomized trials, which we label the “District Court Study” after the type of court in which it took place. In this District Court Study, most occupants who became part of the study population received limited assistance in how-to sessions, which included instruction on the summary eviction process as well as help in filling out answer and discovery request forms. After receiving this “unbundled” assistance, members of a randomly selected treated group were offered a traditional attorney-client relationship from a legal aid provider staff attorney; members of the remaining randomly selected control group received no such offer. We compared outcomes for the treated group versus the control group on a variety of dimensions, focusing primarily on possession of the unit, financial consequences of the litigation, and measures of court burden. At least for the clientele involved in this District Court Study – a clientele recruited and chosen by the legal aid provider’s proactive, timely, specific, and selective outreach and intake system – an offer of full representation mattered. Approximately two-thirds of occupants in the treated group, versus about one-third of occupants in the control group, retained possession of their units at the end of litigation. Using a conservative proxy for financial consequences, and based on a subset of cases in which financial issues were at the forefront, treated-group occupants received payments or rent waivers worth on average a net of 9.4 months of rent per case, versus 1.9 months of rent per case in the control group. Both results were statistically significant. Meanwhile, although treated cases did take longer to reach judgment, the offer of representation caused no increase in court burden as measured by other, more salient metrics, such as the number of party motions or the quantity of judicial rulings. We discuss possible reasons for the magnitude of the differences between the outcomes experienced by the treated and control groups. For example, following previous work, we discuss the possible importance of the legal aid provider’s process for client recruitment and selection. Here, the provider invested substantial resources into a system designed to recruit and identify clients for whom unbundled legal assistance would be inadequate, suggesting that identifying such cases can be done but that doing so may be expensive. We conclude by discussing future directions for a movement, growing in momentum, toward an evidence-based approach for access to, and administration of, justice.Publication The Quantitative Empirics of Redistricting Litigation: Knowledge, Threats to Knowledge, and the Need for Less Districting(Yale Law School, 2011) Greiner, JamesThe experience of the past 50 years has taught us important lessons about the advancement in, but also the ultimate limits of, the quantitative empirics of redistricting. I provide a bird's eye view of the state of quantitative methods in redistricting, focusing particularly on the hardest problem in this area, inferences about racial bloc voting. I review some of the recent advances, particularly those that allow analysis of polities with more than two racial groups, and those that allow a combination of information from sampling techniques, such as exit polls, and so-called “ecological” data. But I also suggest that modern demographic and voting trends, along with a growing realization that there are some critical questions we will never be able to answer (at least not with quantitative information), provide reason for pessimism about how much useful evidence quantitative methods can ultimately produce. I suggest that the increasing limits of quantitative techniques, particularly with respect to voting patterns by race, provide an additional reason to explore the judicious use of alternative vote aggregation schemes, such as limited and cumulative voting.Publication Re-Solidifying Racial Bloc Voting: Empirics and Legal Doctrine in the Melting Pot(Indiana University School of Law, 2011) Greiner, JamesRacial bloc voting is the central concept in judicial regulation of redistricting. For the past several decades, the definition and proof of this concept have depended on two premises: that polities can be conceptualized in biracial terms and that nearly perfect information on voting patterns can be inexpensively obtained from simple statistical methods. In fact, however, neither premise has been true for some time, as the nation has become multiracial and allegations have increased that Caucasians vote less monolithically than before, with both assertions imposing severe stress on the simple statistical methods previously used to assess voting patterns. In this article, I analyze these challenges to traditional understandings and attempt to answer the following question: how can we litigate racial bloc voting well in the current era? I provide recommendations, including greater reliance on more sophisticated statistical methods, an increase in the use of sample surveys, and a renewed receptivity to nonquantitative evidence on voting patterns, while clarifying that each of these recommendations carries substantial costs. I then discuss the conceptual and normative implications of my recommendations on the empirics.Publication Exit Polling and Racial Bloc Voting: Combining Individual-Level and R x C Ecological Data(Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2010) Greiner, James; Quinn, KevinDespite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a necessary part of many areas of quantitative inference, including in United States voting rights litigation. Ecological inference suffers from a lack of identification that, most agree, is best addressed by incorporating individual-level data into the model. In this paper, we test the limits of such an incorporation by attempting it in the context of drawing inferences about racial voting patterns using a combination of an exit poll and precinct-level ecological data; accurate information about racial voting patterns is needed to trigger voting rights laws that can determine the composition of United States legislative bodies. Specifically, we extend and study a hybrid model that addresses two-way tables of arbitrary dimension. We apply the hybrid model to an exit poll we administered in the City of Boston in 2008. Using the resulting data as well as simulation, we compare the performance of a pure ecological estimator, pure survey estimators using various sampling schemes, and our hybrid. We conclude that the hybrid estimator offers substantial benefits by enabling substantive inferences about voting patterns not practicably available without its use.Publication Not All Statistics Are Created Equal(Harvard University, Harvard Law School, 2010) Greiner, JamesIn Statistics Is a Plural Word, a response to my article Causal Inference in Civil Rights Litigation, Dean Steven Willborn and Professor Ramona Paetzold take issue both with my critique of regression as it is currently used in civil rights litigation and with my advocacy of the potential outcomes framework. In this Reply, I argue that Dean Willborn and Professor Paetzold’s response does not address (and thus cannot refute) the central lessons of Causal Inference, despite purporting to agree with those lessons. In particular, after “agree[ing] wholeheartedly” that a definition of a causal effect is necessary for the use of statistics in civil rights, Plural does not offer a definition. In the absence of such a definition, the purpose of statistics in civil rights litigation is unclear. The potential outcomes framework, in contrast, provides the needed definition and clarifies many subsidiary concepts, with salutary consequences following naturally from a start in the right place.Publication Causal Effects of Perceived Immutable Characteristics(Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press), 2011) Greiner, James; Rubin, DonaldDespite their ubiquity, observational studies to infer the causal effect of a so-called immutable characteristic, such as race or sex, have struggled for coherence, given the unavailability of a manipulation analogous to a “treatment” in a randomized experiment and the danger of posttreatment bias. We demonstrate that a shift in focus from actual traits to perceptions of them can address both of these issues while facilitating articulation of other critical concepts, particularly the timing of treatment assignment. We illustrate concepts by discussing the designs of various studies of the role of race in trial court death penalty decisions.