Tom S. Clark

Clark, Tom S., and John W. Patty, “Which Issues Should We Decide? Coalitions and Agenda Setting” (working paper)
The study of politics involves not just how the government decides questions but when it decides to act and on what subjects. We propose a model of collegial agenda-setting in which issues can be packaged together for resolution. We situate the model in the context of the US Supreme Court to investigate how collective choice and discretionary review interact to shape what problems get resolved. Our model yields novel insights into the ways in which cases can interact with each other to affect which cases are selected for review and the timing in when open questions are resolved.

England, Sam, and Tom S. Clark. “Influential Dissents” (working paper)
We study the incentives for writing dissenting opinions that try to shape the law. We model the interaction between a minority and majority in a collegial court setting. Dissenting judges calculate how much effort to put into a dissenting opinion with an expectation that their work can probabilistically affect how the law is applied in the future. That calculus can influence how a majority opinion author writes an opinion and the dynamics of collegial decision-making and coalition formation. We evaluate comparative statics about the content of opinions and the conditions under which dissenting opinions should emerge from collective choice.

Stacking the Charges: Prosecutorial Discretion in Criminal Charging Decisions (working paper)
Prosecutorial discretion is an inherent part of the legal system. Recent policy debates and political campaigns have focused on that discretion as a source of racial disparities in criminal justice. This paper evaluates the practice of charge-stacking, whereby prosecutors decide how many and which charges to file against a single criminal defendant. On the logic that prosecutors are more prone to file weaker additional charges against Black defendants, I apply an outcome test to assess the strength of those additional charges. Using data from the Cook County State Attorney's Office, I find that Black defendants are less likely that their White counterparts to be convicted on a given secondary charge and, conditional upon conviction receive shorter prison sentences. I interpret this finding as evidence that prosecutors are willing to bring weaker cases against Black defendants than they are against White defendants.

A Model of Criminal Justice Discretion (working paper)
Criminal prosecutors weild remendous power in the American legal system. However, their ability to direct prosecution against criminal suspects relies on coordination with the police who investigate crimes and make arrests. That relationship has been made more prominent in the context of reform prosecutors who propose to shift traditional law-enforcement priorities. I propose a novel model of police-prosecutor interactions that focuses on the informational asymmetry between police and prosecutors. Police are endowed with private information about the true criminality of an arrested suspect but also have biases about prosecution and charges. I evaluate how prosecutors' preferences over leniency affect credible communication between police and prosecutors. Analysis of the model identifies empirical implications for the types of criminal suspects prosecuted, prosecutors' adoption of police charges, and the success rate for prosecutors who take cases to trial.

Clark, Tom S., and John W. Patty. “Managing Intractable Problems” (working paper)
Intractable problems are inherent to governance and politics. A problem is “intractable” if it is not only difficult to agree on a solution, but also difficult to agree on what a potential solution will lead to. Intractable problems are characterized by broad and persistent low public satisfaction. We introduce two related, but distinct, notions of why reform might be pursued in a political system: complexity and complicatedness. Complexity centers on the difficulty of understanding the problem itself, and complicatedness focuses on the difficulty of making accurate decisions to mitigate the problem. Additionally, we also consider how these notions are caused and/or ameliorated by having an “outsider” reconfigure the decision process. In addition to offering a specific definition of a political outsider, the theory provides insight into how each of these can emerge in real-world political decision-making processes, and how their presence affects the potential costs and benefits of reform by an outsider.