La responsabilidad solidaria de los consorcios y su regulación en el tiempo

The key outcome variable for the fourth hypothesis is the number of years between when the FCC received a case and when the FCC issued its decision. Since FCC decisions do not list the specific date a case was filed, I rely on the year indicator included in every case number, which provides the year in which the FCC received each case. This variable, Decision Years, is the number of years between this application year and the year in which the FCC issues its decision.¹⁴ Since this variable is a count measure, I estimate a negative binomial regression.¹⁵

There are two primary explanatory variables for the fourth hypothesis. The first is

14Cases decided in the same year they are received by the FCC take a value of 0, cases decided in the year following the application to the court take a value of 1, and so on.

15An alternative specification is to use a survival model since the outcome is effectively the likelihood of a case ”surviving”, that is not being decided by the FCC, in a given year as explained by the timing of the case’s application. I include in the appendix an estimation of the model using a Cox Proportional Hazard model, as another common approach in political science (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 1997; Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn 2001). The results of this Cox Proportional Hazard model are statistically and substantively similar to those of the negative binomial model used here. The results of this robustness check are provided in the appendix. I use the negative binomial here for its more straightforward interpretation and presentation of predicted probabilities and interaction effects.

Table 5.6: Time to Decision Hypothesis Preliminary Analysis

First Variable Second Variable Government Brief? Correlation p-value Election to Filing Time Decision Years Yes 0.10 0.04

Election to Filing Time Decision Years No 0.06 0.52

when a case reaches the FCC with respect to the national electoral calendar. This variable, Election to Filing Time, is the number of years between the case’s arrival at the FCC and the preceding national election. Note that, as with the variable Decision Years, the year of a case’s arrival at the FCC is determined by the case number, which does not provide a specific date. Thus, a case that arrived at the FCC in an election year is coded 0.

The second explanatory variable is No Government Brief, as the hypothesis predicts the relationship between Election to Filing Time and Decision Years to be conditioned by the threat of noncompliance.

A simple correlation test, presented in Table 5.6, supports the hypothesis’s expecta-tion. A positive relationship exists between the two variables, suggesting that the nearer to an election the FCC receives a case, the longer the court takes to issue its decision.

Critically, this relationship only is found in cases including a brief from the government defending the constitutionality of the challenged statute. To test the robustness of this preliminary result, I extend the analysis. Because of this conditional relationship, I in-teract Election to Filing Time with No Government Brief, with the expectation that the coefficient for Election to Filing Time will be positive. I further include a series of control variables to address potential omitted variable bias. The variable Case Complex-ity addresses the possibilComplex-ity that it takes the FCC longer to decide more complex cases.

Moreover, it may take litigants more time after an election to bring forward a case involv-ing complex statutes, either because it took the government longer to pass the statute in question or because the complex nature of the legislation limited the number of litigants

capable of bringing a plausible suit to the court. The variable Lower Court Unconstitu-tionality Brief controls for the legal merits of each case, as the quality of legal arguments could influence the time needed to decide a case as well as the timing of litigation. Failing to include these characteristics of each case could lead to biased results and ultimately hamper the ability of the empirical models to distinguish between the two competing accounts of judicial behavior.

In addition to these case-focused controls, I include a control variable to address the possible impact of election results on the relationship between Decision Years and Election to Filing Time. If an election results in a change in the partisan control of government, litigants may have an incentive to challenge the previous government’s policies shortly after the election. Without the enacting government in power to defend against these challenges, the threat of noncompliance may be less immediate. As a result, the FCC can strike down legislation challenged in such suits more quickly. To account for this potential dynamic, I include the variable Government Change. This variable takes a value of 1 if the election immediately preceding an application to the FCC results in a partisan change of government and 0 if the incumbent party retains control of government.

The results of this analysis are presented in Table 5.7. The coefficient of interest here, Election to Filing Time, is positive and statistically significant. This indicates that when the federal government files a brief defending the constitutionality of a challenged statute, the FCC takes longer to decide the case the later in the electoral cycle the court receives it. That is, the more time that passes between a case’s arrival at the FCC and the preceding national election, the longer the FCC takes to issue its decision in the case.

This relationship, however, only holds in cases where noncompliance is at issue. When the government does not file a brief in defense of the law under review, the number of years taken by the FCC to decide a case is unrelated to when the FCC received the case.

Importantly, this conditional relationship holds after the inclusion of key control variables such as the legal merits of each case and the results of the previous election.

Table 5.7: Time To Decision Hypothesis Analysis Election to Filing Time × No Government Brief −0.10

(0.07)

Constant 1.16^∗

(0.10)

N 497

Standard errors in parentheses

∗ indicates significance at p < 0.05

Figure 5.8 provides a graphical representation of these relationships for a substantive interpretation of the results. The most interesting result is presented in the left panel of the figure. Cases filed in the same year as a national election take the FCC on average 3.24 years to decide when the government files a brief defending the constitutionality of the challenged statute. This contrasts to the 3.89 years the FCC takes to issue a decision in cases received the maximum number of years after the last national election (3 years).

That is, the FCC takes 237 days longer to decide cases that reach the court at the end of the electoral cycle than those that reach the FCC in the same year as an election. Given that cases in the dataset took the FCC an average of 3.44 years to decide, this difference is far from trivial. Indeed, it can be the difference between issuing a decision in a media-rich electoral environment and issuing the same decision in the middle of the electoral cycle.

In short, this evidence is consistent with the “proactive” account in that the FCC delays decisions to some degree based on timing.

Figure 5.8: Predicted Number of Years Between Application and FCC Decision

Number of Years Between Application and Election

Number of Years Between Application and FCC Decision

2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0

0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0

Government Brief Filed

0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0

No Government Brief Filed

Note: Based on model 1 from Table 5.7. Shaded bands indicate 90% confidence intervals.