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Media
Eggers and Hainmueller, Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios (2013) 0.50
| Where to find it | Journal of Politics 75(2) | |
| Belief Y | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. | Truth 0.50 |
Beliefs this work bears on
| # | Belief | Bears | Belief's truth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. What it shows: Congressional portfolios did not beat the market. | weakens | 0.50 |
The beliefs that cite this work, which way it bears on each, and what it shows there. A work earns its place by what it changes; whether it deserved to is argued below.
Quality ArgumentsHow media is scored →
Reasons to agree that the work makes its case well
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Well reasonedBetter matched benchmarks and a larger sample than the study it responds to, and it reexamines the earlier period as well. | 0.50 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.50 | 1.00 | +0.00 |
| 2 | Primary sourcesSame filings, independently coded. | 0.50 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.50 | 1.00 | +0.00 |
Reasons to disagree
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One-sidedPortfolio averages cannot detect the small number of well-timed trades that the conflict claim is actually about, and the paper does not engage that objection at length. | 0.50 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.50 | 1.00 | -0.00 |
Total agree 0.00 · total disagree 0.00 · quality score 0.50
Quality is craft: is the work accurate, well reasoned and well made? Reasons here are about the work itself, never about whether the belief it speaks to is true.
Impact Arguments
Reasons to agree that the work has shaped the debate
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Widely citedIt is the standard citation for the skeptical position and appears in every serious review of the question. | 0.50 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.50 | 1.00 | +0.00 |
Reasons to disagree
| # | Reason (pattern) | Truth | Conf | Link | Imp | Uniq | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Small audienceIts reach outside political science is small compared with the study it corrects. | 0.50 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0.50 | 1.00 | -0.00 |
Total agree 0.00 · total disagree 0.00 · impact score 0.50
Impact is reach: has the work changed what people think, say or do about the topic? Reasons here are about influence, never about quality; a bad book can be influential.
Check table
| 1 | The work | Eggers and Hainmueller, Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios (2013) |
| 2 | Type | Study |
| 3 | What it claims about the belief | Congressional portfolios did not beat the market. |
| 4 | Computed quality | 0.50 from 2 reason(s) to agree and 1 to disagree |
| 5 | Computed impact | 0.50 from 1 reason(s) to agree and 1 to disagree |
| 6 | Bottom line, typed by the author after the tables above | The most careful study on the skeptical side, and the tail-versus-average objection is unresolved. |
The five steps, answered from the pages above. Only the one-sentence bridge and the bottom line are typed.
DefinitionsThe full explanation →
- Quality: this page's truth score. Impact: the second score below. Y's page shows both on the work's row and multiplies them by Bears (a Type Media linkage page) and Imp (the work's importance page).
- Truth of what the work says is not scored here: each finding it reports gets its own page in the Evidence Ledger.
Where This Page Is Used
| Page | Table | As | Its truth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain. | media | a row | 0.50 |
Every page that reads this one. One claim, one home, every use visible.
Scoring EngineTruth scores →
| Quantity | Value | How |
|---|---|---|
| Reasons to agree, total | 0.00 | sum of the agree side |
| Reasons to disagree, total | 0.00 | sum of the disagree side |
| Quality score | 0.50 | (agree + weight x starting point) / (agree + disagree + weight), starting point 0.50, weight 1.00 |
| Impact score | 0.50 | the same rule applied to the impact table |
| ReasonRank | 0.0000 | how much of the site depends on this page: rank 1953 of 2173. The share of a walk that starts at the 162 beliefs and steps to the pages they read, with a 0.85 chance of stepping on each time |
| Work value | 0.0000 | ReasonRank x (1 - confidence): how much settling this page would be worth to everything above it |
| Completeness | yes | at least one scored reason on each side (an importance page: at least one interest; an interest page: both readings filled) |
Cite this page Eggers and Hainmueller, Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios (2013). Idea Stock Exchange, media page eggers-hainmueller-capitol-losses, truth 0.50, confidence 28%, revision 42c8344 of 2026-10-04. The revision is what makes this quotable: these numbers move as the argument is worked on, and rebuilding that revision reproduces them exactly.
Every number on this page as data: eggers-hainmueller-capitol-losses.json. Constants: K = 1 · UNARG = 0.5 · DEFLINK = 1 · DEFIMP = 0.5 · DEFUNIQ = 1. A reason placed under a conclusion is presumed relevant until a linkage page says otherwise; the burden is on the challenger. The neutral start for importance, the wiki's own rule.
Every value here is computed from the tables above at build time. Nothing is typed.