Adam J Ramey
Biographic Data
| ID | 1239647 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam J Ramey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam J |
| FAMILY NAME | Ramey |
| SIGNATURE | RAMEY A J |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5047-8083 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Filibusted? The mixed effects of “going nuclear”
Perennial gridlock in Washington has led to many political and media elites calling for an end to the filibuster. But would it matter? In this paper, we derive a series of legislative bargaining models and show that eliminating the filibuster would likely affect gridlock in a narrow set of circumstances. Using data on gridlock from Binder (2015) , we conduct simulations to examine the effect of removing the filibuster on outcomes. The results dem…
Measuring party loyalty
Measuring party loyalty (and party effects, more broadly) in roll call voting has long been a contentious matter in the study of legislative behavior. While techniques for measurement in this arena are numerous, most of them suffer from a fatal flaw: they improperly (or insufficiently) separate measures of preferences from party effects. A significant part of this measurement challenge is the identification of (a) which roll calls leaders care ab…
Don’t answer me? A cautionary tale of personality traits and survey nonresponse
In recent years, there has been an explosion of research looking at the relationship between Big Five personality traits and political behavior. This boom has been driven by the development of brief inventories that can assess subjects’ traits in as few as ten questions. Despite these developments, subjects’ own propensity to complete the surveys may be driven by their personality traits. As a result, key findings in this literature may be plague…
The tangled web of policy support
Still the Same? Revealed Preferences and Ideological Self-Perception Among Former Members of Congress
For years, countless scholars have posited the role of constituency and party pressure on legislators’ roll call voting records. Indeed, though popular estimates of legislators’ preferences often come from roll call data (e.g., DW-NOMINATE scores), most scholars are careful to note that these are not necessarily measures of ideology per se but rather of legislators’ revealed preferences—that is, they reflect both legislators’ ideological commitme…
(Sympathy for) the Devil You Know
Why do some individuals prefer lesser-known, riskier experiences over more well-known options in life? In this paper, we focus on the case of the electoral advantage to incumbency, and the role that psychological entropy reduction can play in undermining that advantage among individuals who lack simplifying heuristics, such as party brand loyalty. We build on recent work in political psychology, applying a more general political psychology framew…
Considerations in Personality Measurement
In another article in this issue, Black et al. discuss their preferred approach to estimating Supreme Court justices’ Big Five personality traits from written text and provide several critiques of the approach of Hall et al. In this rejoinder, we show that Black et al.’s critiques are substantially without merit, their preferred approach suffers from many of the same drawbacks that they project onto our approach, their specific method of implemen…
Attributes beyond Attitudes
Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 …
Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech
We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior
What I Like About You
Welcome to the Machine
Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psychologists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision making. Here, we bridge these literatures by offering a framework for modeling how personality influences legislative behavior. Drawing from experimental economics and neuropsychology, we identify core co…
When Loyalty Is Tested
Theories of parties in Congress contend that one tool that party leaders possess to induce loyalty among rank-and-file members is control over committee assignments, but conventional tests of this linkage have failed to distinguish loyalty from simply voting one's preferences in accordance with party leaders. We characterize loyal legislators as having a higher propensity for voting with party leaders when it matters, even when their preferences …
Don’t Know What You Got
Individuals who are more sensitive to negative outcomes from error are more likely to provide nonresponses in surveys. We argue Neurotics’ sensitivity to negative outcomes leads them to avoid gathering costly information and forming/reporting opinions about stimuli. Using data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show Neuroticism is strongly and positively associated with NA/DK responses when placing politicians on a seven-p…
Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Crowdsourced Ideal Point Estimation
Measuring the ideology of voters and legislators has long been of interest to political scientists. Recently, a literature has emerged seeking to combine methodologies so as to measure ideology in a common space. In turn, these common space measures are employed to estimate legislative accountability and ideological congruence. While these attempts have been fruitful, they frequently rely on highly specific data formats and increasing computation…
Weighing the Alternatives
Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party position, though substantive scholars have for decades hypothesized otherwise. Focusing on the U.S. Senate, we develop a new statistical estimator to det…
Bringing the minority back to the party
Scholars of Congress and other legislative institutions have posited that majority agenda-setting is one of the primary mechanisms by which a majority party demonstrates its power over legislation. However, this line of work has difficulty explaining why the floor median would delegate such power to the majority. In this paper, I develop a theory of lawmaking in an incomplete-information environment. The model allows for information transmission …
National Survival and the Confederate Congress
The author analyzes the voting behavior of legislators in the Congresses of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He shows that the occupation of Confederate Congressional districts by Federal troops led legislators to abandon their previous voting behavior and instead support the strengthening of the central government in Richmond. Specific case evidence involving voting on a number of salient issues is provided to fur…
Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech
We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior
Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Crowdsourced Ideal Point Estimation
Measuring the ideology of voters and legislators has long been of interest to political scientists. Recently, a literature has emerged seeking to combine methodologies so as to measure ideology in a common space. In turn, these common space measures are employed to estimate legislative accountability and ideological congruence. While these attempts have been fruitful, they frequently rely on highly specific data formats and increasing computation…
What I Like About You
When Loyalty Is Tested
Theories of parties in Congress contend that one tool that party leaders possess to induce loyalty among rank-and-file members is control over committee assignments, but conventional tests of this linkage have failed to distinguish loyalty from simply voting one's preferences in accordance with party leaders. We characterize loyal legislators as having a higher propensity for voting with party leaders when it matters, even when their preferences …
Weighing the Alternatives
Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party position, though substantive scholars have for decades hypothesized otherwise. Focusing on the U.S. Senate, we develop a new statistical estimator to det…
Attributes beyond Attitudes
Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 …
Don’t Know What You Got
Individuals who are more sensitive to negative outcomes from error are more likely to provide nonresponses in surveys. We argue Neurotics’ sensitivity to negative outcomes leads them to avoid gathering costly information and forming/reporting opinions about stimuli. Using data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show Neuroticism is strongly and positively associated with NA/DK responses when placing politicians on a seven-p…
(Sympathy for) the Devil You Know
Why do some individuals prefer lesser-known, riskier experiences over more well-known options in life? In this paper, we focus on the case of the electoral advantage to incumbency, and the role that psychological entropy reduction can play in undermining that advantage among individuals who lack simplifying heuristics, such as party brand loyalty. We build on recent work in political psychology, applying a more general political psychology framew…
Bringing the minority back to the party
Scholars of Congress and other legislative institutions have posited that majority agenda-setting is one of the primary mechanisms by which a majority party demonstrates its power over legislation. However, this line of work has difficulty explaining why the floor median would delegate such power to the majority. In this paper, I develop a theory of lawmaking in an incomplete-information environment. The model allows for information transmission …
National Survival and the Confederate Congress
The author analyzes the voting behavior of legislators in the Congresses of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He shows that the occupation of Confederate Congressional districts by Federal troops led legislators to abandon their previous voting behavior and instead support the strengthening of the central government in Richmond. Specific case evidence involving voting on a number of salient issues is provided to fur…
Weighing the Alternatives
Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party position, though substantive scholars have for decades hypothesized otherwise. Focusing on the U.S. Senate, we develop a new statistical estimator to det…
Bringing the minority back to the party
Scholars of Congress and other legislative institutions have posited that majority agenda-setting is one of the primary mechanisms by which a majority party demonstrates its power over legislation. However, this line of work has difficulty explaining why the floor median would delegate such power to the majority. In this paper, I develop a theory of lawmaking in an incomplete-information environment. The model allows for information transmission …
Don’t Know What You Got
Individuals who are more sensitive to negative outcomes from error are more likely to provide nonresponses in surveys. We argue Neurotics’ sensitivity to negative outcomes leads them to avoid gathering costly information and forming/reporting opinions about stimuli. Using data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show Neuroticism is strongly and positively associated with NA/DK responses when placing politicians on a seven-p…
Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Crowdsourced Ideal Point Estimation
Measuring the ideology of voters and legislators has long been of interest to political scientists. Recently, a literature has emerged seeking to combine methodologies so as to measure ideology in a common space. In turn, these common space measures are employed to estimate legislative accountability and ideological congruence. While these attempts have been fruitful, they frequently rely on highly specific data formats and increasing computation…
Welcome to the Machine
Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psychologists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision making. Here, we bridge these literatures by offering a framework for modeling how personality influences legislative behavior. Drawing from experimental economics and neuropsychology, we identify core co…
When Loyalty Is Tested
Theories of parties in Congress contend that one tool that party leaders possess to induce loyalty among rank-and-file members is control over committee assignments, but conventional tests of this linkage have failed to distinguish loyalty from simply voting one's preferences in accordance with party leaders. We characterize loyal legislators as having a higher propensity for voting with party leaders when it matters, even when their preferences …
Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech
We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996 to 2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on congressional behavior
What I Like About You
(Sympathy for) the Devil You Know
Why do some individuals prefer lesser-known, riskier experiences over more well-known options in life? In this paper, we focus on the case of the electoral advantage to incumbency, and the role that psychological entropy reduction can play in undermining that advantage among individuals who lack simplifying heuristics, such as party brand loyalty. We build on recent work in political psychology, applying a more general political psychology framew…
Considerations in Personality Measurement
In another article in this issue, Black et al. discuss their preferred approach to estimating Supreme Court justices’ Big Five personality traits from written text and provide several critiques of the approach of Hall et al. In this rejoinder, we show that Black et al.’s critiques are substantially without merit, their preferred approach suffers from many of the same drawbacks that they project onto our approach, their specific method of implemen…
Attributes beyond Attitudes
Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 …
Still the Same? Revealed Preferences and Ideological Self-Perception Among Former Members of Congress
For years, countless scholars have posited the role of constituency and party pressure on legislators’ roll call voting records. Indeed, though popular estimates of legislators’ preferences often come from roll call data (e.g., DW-NOMINATE scores), most scholars are careful to note that these are not necessarily measures of ideology per se but rather of legislators’ revealed preferences—that is, they reflect both legislators’ ideological commitme…
The tangled web of policy support
Filibusted? The mixed effects of “going nuclear”
Perennial gridlock in Washington has led to many political and media elites calling for an end to the filibuster. But would it matter? In this paper, we derive a series of legislative bargaining models and show that eliminating the filibuster would likely affect gridlock in a narrow set of circumstances. Using data on gridlock from Binder (2015) , we conduct simulations to examine the effect of removing the filibuster on outcomes. The results dem…
Measuring party loyalty
Measuring party loyalty (and party effects, more broadly) in roll call voting has long been a contentious matter in the study of legislative behavior. While techniques for measurement in this arena are numerous, most of them suffer from a fatal flaw: they improperly (or insufficiently) separate measures of preferences from party effects. A significant part of this measurement challenge is the identification of (a) which roll calls leaders care ab…
Don’t answer me? A cautionary tale of personality traits and survey nonresponse
In recent years, there has been an explosion of research looking at the relationship between Big Five personality traits and political behavior. This boom has been driven by the development of brief inventories that can assess subjects’ traits in as few as ten questions. Despite these developments, subjects’ own propensity to complete the surveys may be driven by their personality traits. As a result, key findings in this literature may be plague…
Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Personality (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)