Published Work

My research interests are quite varied -- too many interesting questions, too little time -- but largely concentrated in understanding the incentives and implications of congressional lawmaking and position-taking in the legislative and electoral arenas. As such, I also have significant interests in campaigns and elections. Here is a enumeration of my peer-reviewed publications; non-peer-reviewed publications are listed, but not enumerated. The linked articles are sometimes preprints, so a few typesetting errors exist (noted in the errata as identified).

[13] Forthcoming. "Laws and Roll Calls in the U.S. Congress, 1891-1994". Legislative Studies Quarterly. With John Lapinski.

Abstract:

Recent empirical studies of lawmaking activity by legislatures rely heavily on roll call-based measures and assume that roll call activity reflects lawmaking activity. This assumption is questioned for the case of the U.S. Congress. We examine several plausible sources of dissonance between the set of enacted public statutes and the universe of recorded votes in the U.S. Congress using a comprehensive dataset of public enactments and roll call activity between 1891 and 1994. Because only 11.9% percent of the bills signed into law receive a recorded vote in the House, only 7.9% receive a recorded vote in the Senate, and only 5.5% receive a recorded vote in both the House and Senate, we provide guidance as to when studying voting behavior is likely a reasonable proxy for lawmaking behavior and we show that there are sometimes important differences between the laws that do and do not receive a roll call that should be accounted for when using roll calls to study lawmaking in the U.S. Congress.

[12] Forthcoming. "Design, and Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism". American Political Science Review. With Scott Ashworth, Adam Meirowitz and Kris Ramsay.

Abstract:

In "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," Robert Pape presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape's conclusions because he "samples on the dependent variable." (The data only contains cases in which suicide terror is used.) We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Pape's hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape's research design.

[11] 2007. "Lawmaking and Roll Calls". Journal of Politics 69(2): 455-67.

Appendix for "Lawmaking and Roll Calls"

Proof for footnote 14 claim.

Link to replication data and code forthcoming

Abstract:

The ability to generate theories of lawmaking has not been matched by an ability to evaluate the success of these theories for explaining legislative reality. The principal problem in testing lawmaking theories is that many analysts use roll call votes -- or various measures based on roll call votes -- when, in fact, these votes are partly a cause and partly a consequence of the very things the theories seek to explain. This leads to erroneous substantive conclusions and characterizations. I show how embedding the theoretical predictions of the party gatekeeping and majoritarian theories of lawmaking within a statistical model used to estimate ideal points yields a straightforward test; if the gridlock interval measured using votes on policies predicted by the theories is nonzero, the theory is false. Implementing the test reveals little support for either theory.

[10] 2007. "Does Advertising Affect Turnout?" Quarterly Journal of Political Science 2(2):27-41. With Scott Ashworth.

Appendix for "Does Advertising Affect Turnout?"

Replication data and code.

Abstract:

We identify an exogenous source of variation in exposure to campaign advertising in the 2000 Presidential election, based on battleground state residence. If campaign advertising exposure makes a potential voter significantly more likely to vote, then we should see significantly greater turnout in battleground states. We do not. This result is robust to several specifications and evident in a natural experiment consisting of New Jersey residents. Conditional on existing campaign targeting strategies, campaigns do not affect the turnout decisions of the voters we study. In addressing the impact of advertising exposure on turnout, we provide evidence that accounting for potential endogeneity concerns in campaign exposure is critically important for studying campaign effects.

[9] 2007. "Expert Opinion, Agency Characteristics and Agency Preferences." Political Analysis 15(3). With David E. Lewis.

Replication data and code.

Abstract:

The study of bureaucracies and their relationship to political actors is central to understanding the policy process in the United States. Our study of this aspect of American politics is hindered by the fact that theories of agency behavior, effectiveness and control often require measures of administrative agencies' policy preferences. Appropriate measures have been hard to come by across a broad spectrum of agencies. We propose a method for measuring agency preferences. We conduct an expert survey on agency preferences for 82 executive agencies in existence between 1988 and 2005 and we use a multirater item response model to measure agency preferences and accounts for rater differences in their degree of discrimination and their implicit thresholds for what constitutes a liberal or conservative agency. We compare the resulting agency ideal point estimates and standard errors to existing alternative measures.

[8] 2006. "Representation in Congress: Constituents and Roll Calls in the 106th House," Journal of Politics 68(2):397-409.

Link to replication data and code for "Representation in Congress"

Abstract:

This paper examines the extent to which constituency and sub-constituency preferences are reflected in roll call voting in the 106th House. Aggregating 100,814 randomly selected respondents to measure sub-constituency preferences provides an unprecedented ability to measure sub-constituency preferences in the House. Looking at the relationship over all votes, "key votes," and on individual votes confirms that representatives are not completely responsive to the district mean voter, that only majority party Republicans are especially responsive to the preferences of same-party constituents, and that same-party constituency preferences cannot entirely account for systematic differences in Republican and Democratic voting behavior.

[7] 2006. "Measuring Legislative Accomplishment, 1877-1994," American Journal of Political Science 50 (1):232-49. With John Lapinski.

Errata: The axis for the bottom graphed of Figure 2 is reversed; the x-axis should be labeled "Item Response Estimates."

Abstract:

Understanding the dynamics of lawmaking in the U.S. is at the center of the study of American politics. A fundamental obstacle to progress in this pursuit is the lack of direct measures of policy output, especially for the period prior to 1946. The lack of direct measures of legislative accomplishment makes it difficult to assess the performance of our political system. We provide a new measure of legislative significance and accomplishment. Specifically, we demonstrate how item response theory can be combined with a new dataset that contains every public statute enacted between 1877 and 1994 to estimate "legislative importance" across time. Although the resulting estimates provide a new opportunity for scholars interested in analyzing policymaking in the U.S. since 1877, the methodology we present is not restricted to Congress, the U.S., or lawmaking.

[6] 2004. "The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call Voting: A Unified Approach," American Political Science Review 98 (2): 355-70. With Simon Jackman and Doug Rivers.

Abstract:

We develop a Bayesian procedure for estimation and inference for spatial models of roll call voting. Our approach is extremely flexible, applicable to any legislative setting, irrespective of size, the extremism of the legislative voting histories, or the number of roll calls available for analysis. Our model is easily extended to let other sources of information inform the analysis of roll call data, such as the number and nature of the underlying dimensions, the presence of party whipping, the determinants of legislator preferences, or the evolution of the legislative agenda; this is especially helpful since generally it is inappropriate to use estimates of extant methods (usually generated under assumptions of sincere voting) to test models embodying alternate assumptions (e.g., logrolling). A Bayesian approach also provides a coherent framework for estimation and inference with roll call data that eludes extant methods; moreover, via Bayesian simulation methods, it is straightforward to generate uncertainty assessments or hypothesis tests concerning any auxiliary quantity of interest or to formally compare models. In a series of examples we show how our method is easily extended to accommodate theoretically interesting models of legislative behavior. Our goal is to move roll call analysis away from pure measurement or description towards a tool for testing substantive theories of legislative behavior.

[5] 2004. "Testing Accounts of Legislative Strategic Voting: The Compromise of 1790," American Journal of Political Science 48(4):675-89. With Adam Meirowitz.

Abstract:

A difficult yet prevalent problem in legislative politics is how to assess explanations when observable actions may not represent true (and unobserved) legislator preferences. We present a method for analyzing the validity of theoretical/historical accounts that unifies theory, history and measurement. We argue that approaches to testing accounts of legislative behavior which are theoretically and historically agnostic are not always best and present an approach which: 1) forms an \textit{explicit} explanation of behavior (here a simple dynamic voting game) that yields estimable parameter constraints, and 2) tests these constraints using a customized empirical model that is as consistent as possible with the explanation. We demonstrate the method using legislative voting data from the first Congress (1789-1791). Using the idea of sophisticated equivalents from voting theory we subject the traditional account of the "Compromise of 1790" to a statistical test and find that there is reason to doubt the claim that legislators of the time believed the specified log roll was taking place. The results suggest that the capital location and assumption issues were resolved independently.

[4] 2004. "An Experimental Study of Political Advertising Effects in the 2000 Presidential Election," Journal of Politics 66(1): 67-96. With John Lapinski.

Abstract:

Scholars disagree whether negative advertising demobilizes or stimulates the electorate. We use an experiment with over 10,200 eligible voters to evaluate the two leading hypotheses of negative political advertising. We extend the analysis to also examine whether advertising differentially impacts the turnout of voter sub-populations depending on the advertisement's message. In the short term, we find no evidence that exposure to negative advertisements decreases turnout and little that suggests it increases turnout. Any effect appears to depend upon the message of the advertisement and the characteristics of the viewer. In the long term, we find little evidence that the information contained in the treatment groups' advertisements is sufficient to systematically alter turnout.

[3] 2004. "The Most Liberal Senator"?: Analyzing and Interpreting Congressional Roll Calls," PS: Political Science & Politics XXXVII (3). With Simon Jackman and Doug Rivers.

Errata: "Bust" should be Bush in the labels for Figures 3 and 4.

Replication data and code.

Abstract:

The non-partisan National Journal recently declared Senator John Kerry to be the "top liberal" in the Senate based on analysis of 62 roll calls in 2003. Although widely reported in the media (and the subject of a debate among the Democratic presidential candidates), we argue that this characterization of Kerry is misleading in at least two respects. First, when we account for the ‘‘margin of error’’ in the voting scores -- which is considerable for Kerry given that he missed 60%of the National Journal’s key votes while campaigning -- we discover that the probability that Kerry is the "top liberal" is only.30, and that we cannot reject the conclusion that Kerry is only the 20th most liberal senator. Second, we compare the position of the President Bush on these key votes; including the President’s announced positions on these votes reveals the President to be just as conservative as Kerry is liberal (i.e., both candidates are extreme relative to the 108th Senate). A similar conclusion holds when we replicate the analysis using all votes cast in the 107th Senate. A more comprehensive analysis than that undertaken by National Journal (including an accounting of the margins of error in voting scores) shows although Kerry belongs to the most liberal quintile of the contemporary Senate, Bush belongs to the most conservative quintile.

2005. "Afterword for `The Most Liberal Senator'", in Quantitative Methods in Practice: Readings from PS. David Rochefort ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press. pp. 116-117.

[2] 2003. "Integrating Voting Theory and Roll-Call Analysis: A Framework," Political Analysis 11(3):381-96. With Adam Meirowitz.

Abstract:

Scholars of legislative studies typically use ideal point estimates from scaling procedures to test theories of legislative politics. We contend that theory and methods may be better integrated by directly incorporating \textit{maintained} and \textit{to be tested hypotheses} in the statistical model used to estimate legislator preferences. In this view of theory and estimation, formal modelling (1) provides auxiliary assumptions that serve as constraints in the estimation process, and (2) generates testable predictions. The estimation and hypothesis testing procedure uses roll call data to evaluate the validity of theoretically derived \textit{to be tested hypotheses} in a world where \textit{maintained hypotheses} are presumed true. We articulate the approach using the language of statistical inference (both frequentist and Bayesian). The approach is demonstrated in analyses of the well-studied Powell amendment to the federal aid to education bill in the 84th House and the Compromise of 1790 in the 1st House.

[1] 2001. "Agenda Constrained Legislator Ideal Points and the Spatial Voting Model," Political Analysis 9(3):242-260. With Adam Meirowitz.

Addendum to "Agenda Constrained Legislator Ideal Points and the Spatial Voting Model"

Abstract:

Existing preference estimation procedures do not incorporate the full structure of the spatial model of voting, as they fail to use the sequential nature of the agenda. In the maximum likelihood framework, the consequences of this omission may be far reaching. First, information useful for the identification of the model is neglected. Specifically, information that identifies the proposal locations is ignored. Second, the dimensionality of the policy-space may be incorrectly estimated. Third, preference and proposal location estimates are incorrect and difficult to interpret in terms of the spatial model. We also show that the Bayesian simulation approach to ideal point estimation (Clinton et. al. (2003), Jackman (2000) may be improved through the use of information about the legislative agenda. This point is illustrated by comparing several preference estimators of the 1st US House (1789-1791).

2007. "Measuring Significant Legislation, 1877-1948," in Process, Party and Policymaking, Vol. 2: Further New Perspectives on the History of Congress., David Brady and Matthew McCubbins eds. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Chapter 24: pp. 361-378. With John Lapinski.

2006. "Review of Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting by Keith Poole," The Political Methodologist 14(1):21-24.

2004. "Relections on Methods Training at Stanford," The Political Methodologist 12(2):11-13.

2003. "Review of Bayesian Data Analysis by Andrew Gelman, John B. Carlin, Hal S. Stern, and Donald B. Rubin," The Political Methodologist 11(2):6-7.

2003. "Chebyshev's Inequality," "Proxy Variable," Regression Plane," "Regression On," "Sphericity Assumption" forthcoming in Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, ed. Lewis-Beck, Michael, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. Sage:NY.

2001. "Testing Television Advertising Using Interactive Television: The Effectiveness of Political Advertisements" in Net Effects 4 ed. David Pring. World Association of Opinion and Market Research Professionals: Amsterdam, Netherlands. With John Lapinski.