Devin Caughey
Biographic Data
| ID | 1030624 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Devin Caughey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Devin |
| FAMILY NAME | Caughey |
| SIGNATURE | CAUGHEY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6419-6805 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 890 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Modgirt
Dynamic models of aggregate public opinion are increasingly popular, but to date they have been restricted to unidimensional latent traits. This is problematic because in many domains the structure of mass preferences is multidimensional. We address this limitation by deriving a multidimensional ordinal dynamic group-level item response theory (MODGIRT) model. We describe the Bayesian estimation of the model and present a novel workflow for deali…
The Democratic-CIO Alliance
The 1947 Labor Management Relations Act—better known as the Taft-Hartley Act after its two congressional sponsors—was a watershed moment in the development of the US political economy. The act revised the 1935 National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act, which had established a legal regime far more favorable to labor unions than any before or since.1 Though spearheaded by Democrats and signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, the Wagner Act received…
Target Estimation and Adjustment Weighting for Survey Nonresponse and Sampling Bias
We elaborate a general workflow of weighting-based survey inference, decomposing it into two main tasks. The first is the estimation of population targets from one or more sources of auxiliary information. The second is the construction of weights that calibrate the survey sample to the population targets. We emphasize that these tasks are predicated on models of the measurement, sampling, and nonresponse process whose assumptions cannot be fully…
Causal inference and American political development
Policy and Performance in the New Deal Realignment
Recent research has challenged the policy bases of the New Deal realignment, arguing that it was instead driven by retrospective evaluations of the economy. Using a comprehensive analysis of opinion polls conducted in 1936–52, we argue that policy preferences were far from irrelevant. At the individual level, presidential Republicans who became Democrats were much more supportive of New Deal policies than those who remained loyal (vice versa for …
Dynamic Ecological Inference for Time-Varying Population Distributions Based on Sparse, Irregular, and Noisy Marginal Data
Social scientists are frequently interested in how populations evolve over time. Creating poststratification weights for surveys, for example, requires information on the weighting variables’ joint distribution in the target population. Typically, however, population data are sparsely available across time periods. Even when population data are observed, the content and structure of the data—which variables are observed and whether their marginal…
Policy Ideology in European Mass Publics, 1981–2016
Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservati…
Public Opinion in Subnational Politics
Until recently, the study of representation at the subnational level was hobbled by the lack of high-quality information about public opinion. The advent of new data sources, however, as well as of new methods such as multilevel regression and poststratification, has greatly enhanced scholars' capacity to describe public opinion in states, legislative districts, cities, and other subnational units. These advances in measurement have in turn revol…
The Unsolid South
During the Jim Crow era, the Democratic Party dominated the American South, presiding over a racially segregated society while also playing an outsized role in national politics. This book provides an entirely new understanding of electoral competition and national representation in this exclusionary one-party enclave. Challenging the notion that the Democratic Party's political monopoly inhibited competition and served only the Southern elite, t…
The Unsolid South
The ideological nationalization of partisan subconstituencies in the American States
Information Equivalence in Survey Experiments
Survey experiments often manipulate the description of attributes in a hypothetical scenario, with the goal of learning about those attributes’ real-world effects. Such inferences rely on an underappreciated assumption: experimental conditions must be information equivalent (IE) with respect to background features of the scenario. IE is often violated because subjects, when presented with information about one attribute, update their beliefs abou…
Policy Preferences and Policy Change
Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future change in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of governmen…
Incremental Democracy
How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity to this question, using regression-discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the effects of party control of state legislatures and governorshi…
Nonparametric Combination (NPC)
Social scientists are commonly advised to deduce and test all observable implications of their theories. We describe a principled framework for testing such "elaborate" theories: nonparametric combination. Nonparametric combination (NPC) assesses the joint probability of observing the theoretically predicted pattern of results under the sharp null of no effects. NPC accounts for the dependence among the component tests without relying on modeling…
Substance and Change in Congressional Ideology
Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE scores have been a boon to the study of Congress, but they are not without limitations. We focus on two limitations that are especially important in historical applications. First, the dimensions uncovered by NOMINATE do not necessarily have a consistent ideological meaning over time. Our case study of the 1920s highlights the challenge of interpreting NOMINATE scores in periods when party lines do not map well onto…
Honor and War
Reputation has long been considered central to international relations, but unobservability, strategic selection, and endogeneity have handicapped quantitative research. A rare source of haphazard variation in the cultural origins of leaders-the fact that one-third of US presidents were raised in the American South, a well-studied example of a culture of honor-provides an opportunity to identify the effects of heightened concern for reputation fo…
The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014
Applying a dynamic latent‐variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936–2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross‐sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states stea…
Dynamic Estimation of Latent Opinion Using a Hierarchical Group-Level IRT Model
Over the past eight decades, millions of people have been surveyed on their political opinions. Until recently, however, polls rarely included enough questions in a given domain to apply scaling techniques such as IRT models at the individual level, preventing scholars from taking full advantage of historical survey data. To address this problem, we develop a Bayesian group-level IRT approach that models latent traits at the level of demographic …
Public Opinion, Organized Labor, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism, 1936–1945
The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation by the U.S. federal government in the early-to-mid-1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive “cradle-to-grave” welfare state marked by strong na…
Elections and the Regression Discontinuity Design
Following David Lee's pioneering work, numerous scholars have applied the regression discontinuity (RD) design to popular elections. Contrary to the assumptions of RD, however, we show that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections (1942–2008) differ markedly on pretreatment covariates. Bare winners possess large ex ante financial, experience, and incumbency advantages over their opponents and are usually the candidates predicted to wi…
Information Equivalence in Survey Experiments
Survey experiments often manipulate the description of attributes in a hypothetical scenario, with the goal of learning about those attributes’ real-world effects. Such inferences rely on an underappreciated assumption: experimental conditions must be information equivalent (IE) with respect to background features of the scenario. IE is often violated because subjects, when presented with information about one attribute, update their beliefs abou…
Policy Preferences and Policy Change
Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future change in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of governmen…
Elections and the Regression Discontinuity Design
Following David Lee's pioneering work, numerous scholars have applied the regression discontinuity (RD) design to popular elections. Contrary to the assumptions of RD, however, we show that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections (1942–2008) differ markedly on pretreatment covariates. Bare winners possess large ex ante financial, experience, and incumbency advantages over their opponents and are usually the candidates predicted to wi…
The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014
Applying a dynamic latent‐variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936–2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross‐sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states stea…
Policy Ideology in European Mass Publics, 1981–2016
Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservati…
Incremental Democracy
How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity to this question, using regression-discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the effects of party control of state legislatures and governorshi…
Dynamic Estimation of Latent Opinion Using a Hierarchical Group-Level IRT Model
Over the past eight decades, millions of people have been surveyed on their political opinions. Until recently, however, polls rarely included enough questions in a given domain to apply scaling techniques such as IRT models at the individual level, preventing scholars from taking full advantage of historical survey data. To address this problem, we develop a Bayesian group-level IRT approach that models latent traits at the level of demographic …
Honor and War
Reputation has long been considered central to international relations, but unobservability, strategic selection, and endogeneity have handicapped quantitative research. A rare source of haphazard variation in the cultural origins of leaders-the fact that one-third of US presidents were raised in the American South, a well-studied example of a culture of honor-provides an opportunity to identify the effects of heightened concern for reputation fo…
Public Opinion, Organized Labor, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism, 1936–1945
The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation by the U.S. federal government in the early-to-mid-1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive “cradle-to-grave” welfare state marked by strong na…
Substance and Change in Congressional Ideology
Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE scores have been a boon to the study of Congress, but they are not without limitations. We focus on two limitations that are especially important in historical applications. First, the dimensions uncovered by NOMINATE do not necessarily have a consistent ideological meaning over time. Our case study of the 1920s highlights the challenge of interpreting NOMINATE scores in periods when party lines do not map well onto…
The ideological nationalization of partisan subconstituencies in the American States
Nonparametric Combination (NPC)
Social scientists are commonly advised to deduce and test all observable implications of their theories. We describe a principled framework for testing such "elaborate" theories: nonparametric combination. Nonparametric combination (NPC) assesses the joint probability of observing the theoretically predicted pattern of results under the sharp null of no effects. NPC accounts for the dependence among the component tests without relying on modeling…
Public Opinion in Subnational Politics
Until recently, the study of representation at the subnational level was hobbled by the lack of high-quality information about public opinion. The advent of new data sources, however, as well as of new methods such as multilevel regression and poststratification, has greatly enhanced scholars' capacity to describe public opinion in states, legislative districts, cities, and other subnational units. These advances in measurement have in turn revol…
Policy and Performance in the New Deal Realignment
Recent research has challenged the policy bases of the New Deal realignment, arguing that it was instead driven by retrospective evaluations of the economy. Using a comprehensive analysis of opinion polls conducted in 1936–52, we argue that policy preferences were far from irrelevant. At the individual level, presidential Republicans who became Democrats were much more supportive of New Deal policies than those who remained loyal (vice versa for …
Causal inference and American political development
Modgirt
Dynamic models of aggregate public opinion are increasingly popular, but to date they have been restricted to unidimensional latent traits. This is problematic because in many domains the structure of mass preferences is multidimensional. We address this limitation by deriving a multidimensional ordinal dynamic group-level item response theory (MODGIRT) model. We describe the Bayesian estimation of the model and present a novel workflow for deali…
Dynamic Ecological Inference for Time-Varying Population Distributions Based on Sparse, Irregular, and Noisy Marginal Data
Social scientists are frequently interested in how populations evolve over time. Creating poststratification weights for surveys, for example, requires information on the weighting variables’ joint distribution in the target population. Typically, however, population data are sparsely available across time periods. Even when population data are observed, the content and structure of the data—which variables are observed and whether their marginal…
Public Opinion, Organized Labor, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism, 1936–1945
The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation by the U.S. federal government in the early-to-mid-1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive “cradle-to-grave” welfare state marked by strong na…
Elections and the Regression Discontinuity Design
Following David Lee's pioneering work, numerous scholars have applied the regression discontinuity (RD) design to popular elections. Contrary to the assumptions of RD, however, we show that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections (1942–2008) differ markedly on pretreatment covariates. Bare winners possess large ex ante financial, experience, and incumbency advantages over their opponents and are usually the candidates predicted to wi…
Dynamic Estimation of Latent Opinion Using a Hierarchical Group-Level IRT Model
Over the past eight decades, millions of people have been surveyed on their political opinions. Until recently, however, polls rarely included enough questions in a given domain to apply scaling techniques such as IRT models at the individual level, preventing scholars from taking full advantage of historical survey data. To address this problem, we develop a Bayesian group-level IRT approach that models latent traits at the level of demographic …
Substance and Change in Congressional Ideology
Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE scores have been a boon to the study of Congress, but they are not without limitations. We focus on two limitations that are especially important in historical applications. First, the dimensions uncovered by NOMINATE do not necessarily have a consistent ideological meaning over time. Our case study of the 1920s highlights the challenge of interpreting NOMINATE scores in periods when party lines do not map well onto…
Honor and War
Reputation has long been considered central to international relations, but unobservability, strategic selection, and endogeneity have handicapped quantitative research. A rare source of haphazard variation in the cultural origins of leaders-the fact that one-third of US presidents were raised in the American South, a well-studied example of a culture of honor-provides an opportunity to identify the effects of heightened concern for reputation fo…
The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014
Applying a dynamic latent‐variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936–2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross‐sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states stea…
Incremental Democracy
How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity to this question, using regression-discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the effects of party control of state legislatures and governorshi…
Nonparametric Combination (NPC)
Social scientists are commonly advised to deduce and test all observable implications of their theories. We describe a principled framework for testing such "elaborate" theories: nonparametric combination. Nonparametric combination (NPC) assesses the joint probability of observing the theoretically predicted pattern of results under the sharp null of no effects. NPC accounts for the dependence among the component tests without relying on modeling…
The Unsolid South
During the Jim Crow era, the Democratic Party dominated the American South, presiding over a racially segregated society while also playing an outsized role in national politics. This book provides an entirely new understanding of electoral competition and national representation in this exclusionary one-party enclave. Challenging the notion that the Democratic Party's political monopoly inhibited competition and served only the Southern elite, t…
The Unsolid South
The ideological nationalization of partisan subconstituencies in the American States
Information Equivalence in Survey Experiments
Survey experiments often manipulate the description of attributes in a hypothetical scenario, with the goal of learning about those attributes’ real-world effects. Such inferences rely on an underappreciated assumption: experimental conditions must be information equivalent (IE) with respect to background features of the scenario. IE is often violated because subjects, when presented with information about one attribute, update their beliefs abou…
Policy Preferences and Policy Change
Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future change in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of governmen…
Dynamic Ecological Inference for Time-Varying Population Distributions Based on Sparse, Irregular, and Noisy Marginal Data
Social scientists are frequently interested in how populations evolve over time. Creating poststratification weights for surveys, for example, requires information on the weighting variables’ joint distribution in the target population. Typically, however, population data are sparsely available across time periods. Even when population data are observed, the content and structure of the data—which variables are observed and whether their marginal…
Policy Ideology in European Mass Publics, 1981–2016
Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservati…
Public Opinion in Subnational Politics
Until recently, the study of representation at the subnational level was hobbled by the lack of high-quality information about public opinion. The advent of new data sources, however, as well as of new methods such as multilevel regression and poststratification, has greatly enhanced scholars' capacity to describe public opinion in states, legislative districts, cities, and other subnational units. These advances in measurement have in turn revol…
Target Estimation and Adjustment Weighting for Survey Nonresponse and Sampling Bias
We elaborate a general workflow of weighting-based survey inference, decomposing it into two main tasks. The first is the estimation of population targets from one or more sources of auxiliary information. The second is the construction of weights that calibrate the survey sample to the population targets. We emphasize that these tasks are predicated on models of the measurement, sampling, and nonresponse process whose assumptions cannot be fully…
Causal inference and American political development
Policy and Performance in the New Deal Realignment
Recent research has challenged the policy bases of the New Deal realignment, arguing that it was instead driven by retrospective evaluations of the economy. Using a comprehensive analysis of opinion polls conducted in 1936–52, we argue that policy preferences were far from irrelevant. At the individual level, presidential Republicans who became Democrats were much more supportive of New Deal policies than those who remained loyal (vice versa for …
The Democratic-CIO Alliance
The 1947 Labor Management Relations Act—better known as the Taft-Hartley Act after its two congressional sponsors—was a watershed moment in the development of the US political economy. The act revised the 1935 National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act, which had established a legal regime far more favorable to labor unions than any before or since.1 Though spearheaded by Democrats and signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, the Wagner Act received…
Modgirt
Dynamic models of aggregate public opinion are increasingly popular, but to date they have been restricted to unidimensional latent traits. This is problematic because in many domains the structure of mass preferences is multidimensional. We address this limitation by deriving a multidimensional ordinal dynamic group-level item response theory (MODGIRT) model. We describe the Bayesian estimation of the model and present a novel workflow for deali…
Political science (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Econometrics (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Mathematics (8 works) · Statistics (7 works)