Benjamin E Lauderdale
Biographic Data
| ID | 1044463 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin E Lauderdale |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin E |
| FAMILY NAME | Lauderdale |
| SIGNATURE | LAUDERDALE B E |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3090-0969 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 747 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Polarization over the priority of political problems
What drives ideological division about political problems? When prioritizing which problems are most in need of redress, voters might disagree about the severity of individual outcomes that constitute such problems; the prevalence of those problems; or whether such problems are amenable to solution by government action. We field a large survey experiment in the United Kingdom and the United States and develop a new measurement approach that allow…
Inferring Individual Preferences from Group Decisions: Judicial Preference Variation and Aggregation on Collegial Courts
Extensive research on judicial politics has documented disparities in adjudication and biases in judging. Yet, lacking statistical methods to infer individual preferences from group decisions, existing studies have focused on courts publishing individual judges’ opinions, leaving a gap in understanding collegial courts that report only collective and unanimous (‘per curiam’) panel decisions. We introduce a statistical methodology to identify the …
The effects of party labels on vote choice with realistic candidate differentiation
In this paper we test how much party labels influence vote choices between candidates when voters have access to realistically distributed information about candidate positions and demographics. We do not seek to adjudicate a long-running debate about the role of party labels, but present some nuances on the two archetypal theoretical views on vote choices. We use data from the Representative Audit of Britain (RAB) and the British Elections Study…
Winning Votes and Changing Minds: Do Populist Arguments Affect Candidate Evaluations and Issue Preferences
Populist rhetoric – presenting arguments in people-centric, anti-elite and ‘good v. evil’ frames – is said to provide populist parties and candidates with an advantage in electoral competition. Yet, identifying the causal effect of populist rhetoric is complicated by its enmeshment with certain positions and issues. We implement a survey experiment in the UK (n≈9,000), in which hypothetical candidates with unknown policy positions randomly make (…
Moderates
Many Americans express a mix of conservative and liberal views across issues. Prior research indicates these voters are cross-pressured. A recent, influential article "Moderates" (Fowler et al. 2023) argues that these voters instead largely have centrist views on individual issues. To reach this conclusion, "Moderates" develops a method to determine which voters' views are well-summarized by liberal-conservative ideology. "Moderates" finds that m…
Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Very Similar Sets of Foundations When Comparing Moral Violations
Applications of moral foundations theory in political science have revealed differences in the degree to which liberals and conservatives explicitly endorse five core moral foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and sanctity. We argue that differences between liberals and conservatives in their explicit ratings of abstract and generalized moral principles do not imply that citizens with different political orientations have fundamenta…
The Variable Persuasiveness of Political Rhetoric
Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative persuasive power of these elements. We report on a novel experimental design which assesses the relative persuasiveness of a larg…
Public Preferences Over Changes to the Composition of Government Tax Revenue
How governments raise tax revenue is at the core of domestic political conflict. Public opinion towards taxation is measured generally and qualitatively by many surveys, but previous research has not closely linked public preferences to the budget problem faced by governments regarding how best to raise or cut a marginal quantity of revenue. We present results from a novel tax preference experiment in which UK respondents are given choices over d…
Can citizens guess how other citizens voted based on demographic characteristics
How well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behavior of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles o…
A Leader Who Sees the World as I Do: Voters Prefer Candidates Whose Statements Reveal Matching Social‐Psychological Attitudes
Politicians are increasingly able to communicate their values, attitudes, and concerns directly to voters. Yet little is known about which of these signals resonate with voters and why. We employ a discrete choice experiment to investigate whether and which social‐psychological attitudes predict how adult British voters respond to corresponding attitudinal signals communicated by candidates in hypothetical social media posts. For all attitudes st…
Measuring Attitudes toward Public Spending Using a Multivariate Tax Summary Experiment
It is difficult to measure public views on trade‐offs between spending priorities because public understanding of existing government spending is limited and the budgetary problem is complicated. We present a new measurement strategy using a continuous treatment, multivariate choice experiment. The experiment proposes deficit‐neutral bundles of changes in spending and taxation, allowing us to investigate attitudes toward modifications to the exis…
Republican-Majority Appellate Panels Increase Execution Rates for Capital Defendants
We use the quasi-random assignment of cases to three-judge panels on the US Courts of Appeals to assess the consistency of adjudication of death penalty appeals. We find clear evidence that panels apply different standards depending on whether a majority of the panel was appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents. Unlike previous work on panel effects in the US Courts of Appeals, we show that these effects persist to the end of the process …
American Political Science Review: Editors’ Report July 1, 2018–February 29, 2020
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
A Choice‐Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate
Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey‐experimental, choice‐based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (a) direct questions eliciting respondents' positions on d…
American Political Science Review Editors’ Report 2017–18
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
American Political Science Review Editors’ Report 2016–17
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability
We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high-profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the rem…
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Agenda Setting and Legislative Voting in Response to the EU Crisis
The European Union's policy response to the recent global economic crisis transferred significant powers from the national to the European level. When exogenous shocks make status quo policies less attractive, legislators become more tolerant to proposed alternatives, and the policy discretion of legislative agenda setters increases. Given control of the EU agenda-setting process by pro-integration actors, we argue that this dynamic explains chan…
Comparing Strategies for Estimating Constituency Opinion from National Survey Samples
Political scientists interested in estimating how public opinion varies by constituency have developed several strategies for supplementing limited constituency survey data with additional sources of information. We present two evaluation studies in the previously unexamined context of British constituency-level opinion: an external validation study of party vote share in the 2010 general election and a cross-validation of opinion toward the Euro…
Dyadic Representation in a Westminster System
Is policy representation in contemporary Westminster systems solely a function of programmatic national parties, or does the election of legislators via single‐member districts result in MPs whose policy positions are individually responsive to public opinion in their constituencies? We generate new measures of constituency opinion in Britain and show that, in three different policy domains and controlling for MP party, the observed legislative b…
Estimating Vote-Specific Preferences from Roll-Call Data Using Conditional Autoregressive Priors
Ideal point estimation in political science usually aims to reduce a matrix of votes to a small number of preference dimensions. We argue that taking a nonparametric perspective can yield measures that are more useful for some subsequent analyses. We propose a conditional autoregressive preference measurement model, which we use to generate case-specific preference estimates for US Supreme Court justices from 1946 to 2005. We show that the varyin…
Partisan Disagreements Arising from Rationalization of Common Information
Why do opposing partisans sometimes disagree about the facts and processes that are relevant to understanding political issues? One explanation is that citizens may have a psychological tendency toward adopting beliefs about the political world that rationalize their partisan preferences. Previous quantitative evidence for rationalization playing a role in explaining partisan factual disagreement has come from cross-sectional covariation and from…
Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech
Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text data perform poorly except when applied to narrowly selected texts discussing the same issues and written in the same style. We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Ir…
Simulating Counterfactual Representation
We show how to use multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate legislative outcomes under counterfactual representation schemes that, for example, boost the representation of women or translate votes into seats differently. We apply this technique to two research questions: (1) Would the U.S. Congress be less polarized if state delegations were formed according to the principle of party proportional representation? (2) Would there hav…
Combining national and constituency polling for forecasting
Crowd-sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data
Empirical social science often relies on data that are not observed in the field, but are transformed into quantitative variables by expert researchers who analyze and interpret qualitative raw sources. While generally considered the most valid way to produce data, this expert-driven process is inherently difficult to replicate or to assess on grounds of reliability. Using crowd-sourcing to distribute text for reading and interpretation by massiv…
Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech
Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text data perform poorly except when applied to narrowly selected texts discussing the same issues and written in the same style. We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Ir…
Distinguishing Between Influences on Brazilian Legislative Behavior
Ideal point estimators hold the promise of identifying multiple dimensions of political disagreement as they are manifested in legislative voting. However, standard ideal point estimates do not distinguish between ideological motivations and voting inducements from parties, coalitions, or the executive. In this article we describe a general approach for hierarchically identifying an ideological dimension using an auxiliary source of data. In the …
Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space
We develop a scaling model to estimate U.S. Supreme Court opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations between opinions. Citations from new opinions to precedent opinions usually apply and endorse the doctrine of the precedent opinion; however, sometimes they implicitly or explicitly dispute the precedent opinion. We collect original datasets classifying citations from search an…
Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes
Item response theory models for roll‐call voting data provide political scientists with parsimonious descriptions of political actors' relative preferences. However, models using only voting data tend to obscure variation in preferences across different issues due to identification and labeling problems that arise in multidimensional scaling models. We propose a new approach to using sources of metadata about votes to estimate the degree to which…
Dyadic Representation in a Westminster System
Is policy representation in contemporary Westminster systems solely a function of programmatic national parties, or does the election of legislators via single‐member districts result in MPs whose policy positions are individually responsive to public opinion in their constituencies? We generate new measures of constituency opinion in Britain and show that, in three different policy domains and controlling for MP party, the observed legislative b…
American Political Science Review: Editors’ Report July 1, 2018–February 29, 2020
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Supreme Court's Many Median Justices
One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences t…
The Variable Persuasiveness of Political Rhetoric
Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative persuasive power of these elements. We report on a novel experimental design which assesses the relative persuasiveness of a larg…
A partisan gap in the supply of female potential candidates in the United States
A partisan disparity in women representatives in the US House emerged in the 1980s and has continued to grow in magnitude. We show that this pattern closely mirrors the emergence of a partisan disparity in the proportion of women in the US public with the typical characteristics of high-level officeholders. Our analysis indicates that the proportion of women in the Democratic pool of potential candidates is now two to three times larger than in t…
Comparing Strategies for Estimating Constituency Opinion from National Survey Samples
Political scientists interested in estimating how public opinion varies by constituency have developed several strategies for supplementing limited constituency survey data with additional sources of information. We present two evaluation studies in the previously unexamined context of British constituency-level opinion: an external validation study of party vote share in the 2010 general election and a cross-validation of opinion toward the Euro…
Unpredictable Voters in Ideal Point Estimation
Ideal point estimators are typically based on an assumption that all legislators are equally responsive to modeled dimensions of legislative disagreement; however, particularistic constituency interests and idiosyncrasies of individual legislators introduce variation in the degree to which legislators cast votes predictably. I introduce a Bayesian heteroskedastic ideal point estimator and demonstrate by Monte Carlo simulation that it outperforms …
Measuring Attitudes toward Public Spending Using a Multivariate Tax Summary Experiment
It is difficult to measure public views on trade‐offs between spending priorities because public understanding of existing government spending is limited and the budgetary problem is complicated. We present a new measurement strategy using a continuous treatment, multivariate choice experiment. The experiment proposes deficit‐neutral bundles of changes in spending and taxation, allowing us to investigate attitudes toward modifications to the exis…
The Genealogy of Law
Many theories of judicial politics have at their core the concepts of legal significance, doctrinal development and evolution, and the dynamics of precedent. Despite rigorous theoretical conceptualization, these concepts remain empirically elusive. We propose the use of a genealogical model (or “family tree”) to describe the Court's construction of precedent over time. We describe statistical assumptions that allow us to estimate this kind of str…
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Agenda Setting and Legislative Voting in Response to the EU Crisis
The European Union's policy response to the recent global economic crisis transferred significant powers from the national to the European level. When exogenous shocks make status quo policies less attractive, legislators become more tolerant to proposed alternatives, and the policy discretion of legislative agenda setters increases. Given control of the EU agenda-setting process by pro-integration actors, we argue that this dynamic explains chan…
A Choice‐Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate
Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey‐experimental, choice‐based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (a) direct questions eliciting respondents' positions on d…
Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability
We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high-profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the rem…
Underperformance in Affluence: The Remarkable Relative Decline in U.S. Heights in the Second Half of the 20th Century
Objective. We use the complete set of NHES and NHANES data collected between 1959 and 2004 in order to construct trends for the physical stature of the non‐Hispanic white and black U.S. adult population and compare them to those of western and northern Europeans. Method. Regression analysis is used to estimate the trend in U.S. heights stratified by gender and ethnicity, holding income and educational attainment constant. Results. U.S. heights st…
Can citizens guess how other citizens voted based on demographic characteristics
How well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behavior of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles o…
Partisan Disagreements Arising from Rationalization of Common Information
Why do opposing partisans sometimes disagree about the facts and processes that are relevant to understanding political issues? One explanation is that citizens may have a psychological tendency toward adopting beliefs about the political world that rationalize their partisan preferences. Previous quantitative evidence for rationalization playing a role in explaining partisan factual disagreement has come from cross-sectional covariation and from…
Combining national and constituency polling for forecasting
Does Inattention to Political Debate Explain the Polarization Gap between the U.S. Congress and Public
Recent studies of the U.S. Congress have demonstrated a substantial difference between the level of partisan polarization displayed by legislators' votes and that shown in citizens' survey responses about those votes. Perhaps public polarization would increase if citizens were more attentive to political debates in Congress. Using natural variation in citizens' levels of political information, I show that citizens who are informed about the parti…
Pass the Pork: Measuring Legislator Shares in Congress
Linear regression models are frequently used to analyze distributive politics in the U.S. Congress; however, authors have used a variety of specifications with different implicit assumptions about how bicameralism shapes legislative bargaining. I derive a model that describes district or state spending authorizations as the aggregation of spending secured by multiple legislators working on behalf of overlapping constituencies. This bicameral shar…
Simulating Counterfactual Representation
We show how to use multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate legislative outcomes under counterfactual representation schemes that, for example, boost the representation of women or translate votes into seats differently. We apply this technique to two research questions: (1) Would the U.S. Congress be less polarized if state delegations were formed according to the principle of party proportional representation? (2) Would there hav…
The effects of party labels on vote choice with realistic candidate differentiation
In this paper we test how much party labels influence vote choices between candidates when voters have access to realistically distributed information about candidate positions and demographics. We do not seek to adjudicate a long-running debate about the role of party labels, but present some nuances on the two archetypal theoretical views on vote choices. We use data from the Representative Audit of Britain (RAB) and the British Elections Study…
Spatial Correlates of Us Heights and Body Mass Indexes, 2002
Aiming to further explore possible underlying causes of the recent remarkable stagnation and relative decline in American heights, this paper describes the result of analysis of the commercial US Sizing Survey (2002). Heights are correlated positively with income and education among both white males and females while Body Mass Index (BMI) is correlated negatively among females, as in other samples. In contrast to much of the literature, this pape…
The mysterious trend in American heights in the 20th century
Given the well-established relationship between adult stature and early-life biological welfare, it was hypothesized that either American diets are sub-optimal or that the universal health care systems and social safety net of the European welfare states are providing a more favorable early-life health environment than does the American health care system
Underperformance in Affluence: The Remarkable Relative Decline in U.S. Heights in the Second Half of the 20th Century
Objective. We use the complete set of NHES and NHANES data collected between 1959 and 2004 in order to construct trends for the physical stature of the non‐Hispanic white and black U.S. adult population and compare them to those of western and northern Europeans. Method. Regression analysis is used to estimate the trend in U.S. heights stratified by gender and ethnicity, holding income and educational attainment constant. Results. U.S. heights st…
Pass the Pork: Measuring Legislator Shares in Congress
Linear regression models are frequently used to analyze distributive politics in the U.S. Congress; however, authors have used a variety of specifications with different implicit assumptions about how bicameralism shapes legislative bargaining. I derive a model that describes district or state spending authorizations as the aggregation of spending secured by multiple legislators working on behalf of overlapping constituencies. This bicameral shar…
Unpredictable Voters in Ideal Point Estimation
Ideal point estimators are typically based on an assumption that all legislators are equally responsive to modeled dimensions of legislative disagreement; however, particularistic constituency interests and idiosyncrasies of individual legislators introduce variation in the degree to which legislators cast votes predictably. I introduce a Bayesian heteroskedastic ideal point estimator and demonstrate by Monte Carlo simulation that it outperforms …
Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space
We develop a scaling model to estimate U.S. Supreme Court opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations between opinions. Citations from new opinions to precedent opinions usually apply and endorse the doctrine of the precedent opinion; however, sometimes they implicitly or explicitly dispute the precedent opinion. We collect original datasets classifying citations from search an…
Distinguishing Between Influences on Brazilian Legislative Behavior
Ideal point estimators hold the promise of identifying multiple dimensions of political disagreement as they are manifested in legislative voting. However, standard ideal point estimates do not distinguish between ideological motivations and voting inducements from parties, coalitions, or the executive. In this article we describe a general approach for hierarchically identifying an ideological dimension using an auxiliary source of data. In the …
Compound Poisson—Gamma Regression Models for Dollar Outcomes That Are Sometimes Zero
Political scientists often study dollar-denominated outcomes that are zero for some observations. These zeros can arise because the data-generating process is granular: The observed outcome results from aggregation of a small number of discrete projects or grants, each of varying dollar size. This article describes the use of a compound distribution in which each observed outcome is the sum of a Poisson—distributed number of gamma distributed qua…
The Genealogy of Law
Many theories of judicial politics have at their core the concepts of legal significance, doctrinal development and evolution, and the dynamics of precedent. Despite rigorous theoretical conceptualization, these concepts remain empirically elusive. We propose the use of a genealogical model (or “family tree”) to describe the Court's construction of precedent over time. We describe statistical assumptions that allow us to estimate this kind of str…
The Supreme Court's Many Median Justices
One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences t…
Does Inattention to Political Debate Explain the Polarization Gap between the U.S. Congress and Public
Recent studies of the U.S. Congress have demonstrated a substantial difference between the level of partisan polarization displayed by legislators' votes and that shown in citizens' survey responses about those votes. Perhaps public polarization would increase if citizens were more attentive to political debates in Congress. Using natural variation in citizens' levels of political information, I show that citizens who are informed about the parti…
A partisan gap in the supply of female potential candidates in the United States
A partisan disparity in women representatives in the US House emerged in the 1980s and has continued to grow in magnitude. We show that this pattern closely mirrors the emergence of a partisan disparity in the proportion of women in the US public with the typical characteristics of high-level officeholders. Our analysis indicates that the proportion of women in the Democratic pool of potential candidates is now two to three times larger than in t…
Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes
Item response theory models for roll‐call voting data provide political scientists with parsimonious descriptions of political actors' relative preferences. However, models using only voting data tend to obscure variation in preferences across different issues due to identification and labeling problems that arise in multidimensional scaling models. We propose a new approach to using sources of metadata about votes to estimate the degree to which…
Estimating Vote-Specific Preferences from Roll-Call Data Using Conditional Autoregressive Priors
Ideal point estimation in political science usually aims to reduce a matrix of votes to a small number of preference dimensions. We argue that taking a nonparametric perspective can yield measures that are more useful for some subsequent analyses. We propose a conditional autoregressive preference measurement model, which we use to generate case-specific preference estimates for US Supreme Court justices from 1946 to 2005. We show that the varyin…
Partisan Disagreements Arising from Rationalization of Common Information
Why do opposing partisans sometimes disagree about the facts and processes that are relevant to understanding political issues? One explanation is that citizens may have a psychological tendency toward adopting beliefs about the political world that rationalize their partisan preferences. Previous quantitative evidence for rationalization playing a role in explaining partisan factual disagreement has come from cross-sectional covariation and from…
Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech
Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text data perform poorly except when applied to narrowly selected texts discussing the same issues and written in the same style. We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Ir…
Simulating Counterfactual Representation
We show how to use multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate legislative outcomes under counterfactual representation schemes that, for example, boost the representation of women or translate votes into seats differently. We apply this technique to two research questions: (1) Would the U.S. Congress be less polarized if state delegations were formed according to the principle of party proportional representation? (2) Would there hav…
Combining national and constituency polling for forecasting
Crowd-sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data
Empirical social science often relies on data that are not observed in the field, but are transformed into quantitative variables by expert researchers who analyze and interpret qualitative raw sources. While generally considered the most valid way to produce data, this expert-driven process is inherently difficult to replicate or to assess on grounds of reliability. Using crowd-sourcing to distribute text for reading and interpretation by massiv…
Dyadic Representation in a Westminster System
Is policy representation in contemporary Westminster systems solely a function of programmatic national parties, or does the election of legislators via single‐member districts result in MPs whose policy positions are individually responsive to public opinion in their constituencies? We generate new measures of constituency opinion in Britain and show that, in three different policy domains and controlling for MP party, the observed legislative b…
American Political Science Review Editors’ Report 2016–17
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability
We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high-profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the rem…
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Agenda Setting and Legislative Voting in Response to the EU Crisis
The European Union's policy response to the recent global economic crisis transferred significant powers from the national to the European level. When exogenous shocks make status quo policies less attractive, legislators become more tolerant to proposed alternatives, and the policy discretion of legislative agenda setters increases. Given control of the EU agenda-setting process by pro-integration actors, we argue that this dynamic explains chan…
Comparing Strategies for Estimating Constituency Opinion from National Survey Samples
Political scientists interested in estimating how public opinion varies by constituency have developed several strategies for supplementing limited constituency survey data with additional sources of information. We present two evaluation studies in the previously unexamined context of British constituency-level opinion: an external validation study of party vote share in the 2010 general election and a cross-validation of opinion toward the Euro…
American Political Science Review Editors’ Report 2017–18
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Political science (33 works) · Politics (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Mathematics (12 works) · Psychology (11 works)