Adam Bonica
Biographic Data
| ID | 1470880 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam Bonica |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam |
| FAMILY NAME | Bonica |
| SIGNATURE | BONICA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3004-9441 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1099 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The “Odd Party Out” Theory of Certiorari
All-mail voting in Colorado increases turnout and reduces turnout inequality
Estimating Judicial Ideology
We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polariz…
Why Are There So Many Lawyers in Congress
Scholars have long sought to explain the overrepresentation of lawyers in Congress. This article draws on a wealth of data to explore the causes and consequences of this representational imbalance. While lawyers enter politics at higher rates, self‐selection at best provides a partial explanation. Conditional on running, lawyers win at twice the rate of candidates from other backgrounds. Contrary to prevailing theories in the literature, voters d…
Are Donation-Based Measures of Ideology Valid Predictors of Individual-Level Policy Preferences
This article validates donation-based measures of ideology against a rich battery of policy items from the Congressional Campaign Election Study. Donation-based measures are powerful predictors of policy preferences for a wide range of issues and successfully discriminate between donors from the same party. The overall predictive accuracy and relative improvement over party are comparable to what is achieved by scaling roll call votes in legislat…
Ideological Extremists in the U.S. Congress
In the last generation, congressional moderates have become ideologically more extreme over the course of their careers. We explain this “ideological migration” of moderates as a side effect of close partisan competition for control of the US House since 1994. Competition for the House caused activists, donors and, indirectly, voters to focus on the battle for majority status. Increased attention to partisan competition reduced individual members…
Inferring Roll‐Call Scores from Campaign Contributions Using Supervised Machine Learning
This article develops a generalized supervised learning methodology for inferring roll‐call scores from campaign contribution data. Rather than use unsupervised methods to recover a latent dimension that best explains patterns in giving, donation patterns are instead mapped onto a target measure of legislative voting behavior. Supervised models significantly outperform alternative measures of ideology in predicting legislative voting behavior. Fu…
A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession
We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the…
Polarized America
A Data-Driven Voter Guide for U.S. Elections
Adam Bonica, A Data-Driven Voter Guide for U.S. Elections: Adapting Quantitative Measures of the Preferences and Priorities of Political Elites to Help Voters Learn About Candidates, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 7, Big Data in Political Economy (November 2016), pp. 11-32
Congressional Polarization and Its Connection to Income Inequality
This essay updates our findings on political polarization in Congress and elite political actors who work through Congress to affect public policy. We also link various threads of our research with the other essays in this volume. We begin with a discussion of the methodologies that enabled us to identify the emergence of political polarization in Congress, and then turn to substantive results.
Solutions to Political Polarization in America
Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from …
Measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire
This paper considers an innovative approach to measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire. After being presented with the President’s requested budget for the upcoming fiscal year, survey respondents were asked to adjust spending levels in line with their personal preferences, subject to budgetary trade-offs. An analysis of survey results reveals that responses sharply contrast with those recovered by tradi…
Senate Gate-Keeping, Presidential Staffing of “Inferior Offices,” and the Ideological Composition of Appointments to the Public Bureaucracy
Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives both the Senate and the President a role in the appointment of public bureaucrats. Yet, since the drafting of that constitutional passage, changes within the Senate and Executive have created new ways for officials to influence who gets appointed to the public bureaucracy. The Senate has developed intricate vetting procedures within its committees, while the Executive Branch has created new meth…
The Punctuated Origins of Senate Polarization
This article uses a new dynamic ideal‐point estimation method that incorporates smoothing techniques to construct a more detailed account of Senate polarization. The results reveal that the Senate polarized in two distinct phases. Member replacement accounts for nearly all of the increase from the early 1970s through the mid‐1990s after which ideological adaptation emerges as the dominant force behind polarization. In addition, I find that a few …
Mapping the Ideological Marketplace
I develop a method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance data. Combined with a data set of over 100 million contribution records from state and federal elections, the method estimates ideal points for an expansive range of political actors. The common pool of contributors who give across institutions and levels of politics makes it possible to recover a unified set of ideological measures for members of Con…
Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?
Ideology and Interests in the Political Marketplace
I develop a statistical method to measure the ideology of candidates and political action committees (PACs) using contribution data. The method recovers ideal points for incumbents that strongly correlate with ideological measures recovered from voting records, while simultaneously recovering positions for PACs, unsuccessful challengers, and open‐seat candidates. As the candidate ideal points are estimated independently of voting records, they re…
Why Hasn't Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality
During the past two generations, democratic forms have coexisted with massive increases in economic inequality in the United States and many other advanced democracies. Moreover, these new inequalities have primarily benefited the top 1 percent and even the top .01 percent. These groups seem sufficiently small that economic inequality could be held in check by political equality in the form of "one person, one vote." In this paper, we explore fiv…
Polarized America
Mapping the Ideological Marketplace
I develop a method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance data. Combined with a data set of over 100 million contribution records from state and federal elections, the method estimates ideal points for an expansive range of political actors. The common pool of contributors who give across institutions and levels of politics makes it possible to recover a unified set of ideological measures for members of Con…
Ideology and Interests in the Political Marketplace
I develop a statistical method to measure the ideology of candidates and political action committees (PACs) using contribution data. The method recovers ideal points for incumbents that strongly correlate with ideological measures recovered from voting records, while simultaneously recovering positions for PACs, unsuccessful challengers, and open‐seat candidates. As the candidate ideal points are estimated independently of voting records, they re…
Why Hasn't Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality
During the past two generations, democratic forms have coexisted with massive increases in economic inequality in the United States and many other advanced democracies. Moreover, these new inequalities have primarily benefited the top 1 percent and even the top .01 percent. These groups seem sufficiently small that economic inequality could be held in check by political equality in the form of "one person, one vote." In this paper, we explore fiv…
Inferring Roll‐Call Scores from Campaign Contributions Using Supervised Machine Learning
This article develops a generalized supervised learning methodology for inferring roll‐call scores from campaign contribution data. Rather than use unsupervised methods to recover a latent dimension that best explains patterns in giving, donation patterns are instead mapped onto a target measure of legislative voting behavior. Supervised models significantly outperform alternative measures of ideology in predicting legislative voting behavior. Fu…
Why Are There So Many Lawyers in Congress
Scholars have long sought to explain the overrepresentation of lawyers in Congress. This article draws on a wealth of data to explore the causes and consequences of this representational imbalance. While lawyers enter politics at higher rates, self‐selection at best provides a partial explanation. Conditional on running, lawyers win at twice the rate of candidates from other backgrounds. Contrary to prevailing theories in the literature, voters d…
Are Donation-Based Measures of Ideology Valid Predictors of Individual-Level Policy Preferences
This article validates donation-based measures of ideology against a rich battery of policy items from the Congressional Campaign Election Study. Donation-based measures are powerful predictors of policy preferences for a wide range of issues and successfully discriminate between donors from the same party. The overall predictive accuracy and relative improvement over party are comparable to what is achieved by scaling roll call votes in legislat…
A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession
We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the…
Senate Gate-Keeping, Presidential Staffing of “Inferior Offices,” and the Ideological Composition of Appointments to the Public Bureaucracy
Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives both the Senate and the President a role in the appointment of public bureaucrats. Yet, since the drafting of that constitutional passage, changes within the Senate and Executive have created new ways for officials to influence who gets appointed to the public bureaucracy. The Senate has developed intricate vetting procedures within its committees, while the Executive Branch has created new meth…
All-mail voting in Colorado increases turnout and reduces turnout inequality
The Punctuated Origins of Senate Polarization
This article uses a new dynamic ideal‐point estimation method that incorporates smoothing techniques to construct a more detailed account of Senate polarization. The results reveal that the Senate polarized in two distinct phases. Member replacement accounts for nearly all of the increase from the early 1970s through the mid‐1990s after which ideological adaptation emerges as the dominant force behind polarization. In addition, I find that a few …
Ideological Extremists in the U.S. Congress
In the last generation, congressional moderates have become ideologically more extreme over the course of their careers. We explain this “ideological migration” of moderates as a side effect of close partisan competition for control of the US House since 1994. Competition for the House caused activists, donors and, indirectly, voters to focus on the battle for majority status. Increased attention to partisan competition reduced individual members…
Estimating Judicial Ideology
We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polariz…
Measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire
This paper considers an innovative approach to measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire. After being presented with the President’s requested budget for the upcoming fiscal year, survey respondents were asked to adjust spending levels in line with their personal preferences, subject to budgetary trade-offs. An analysis of survey results reveals that responses sharply contrast with those recovered by tradi…
A Data-Driven Voter Guide for U.S. Elections
Adam Bonica, A Data-Driven Voter Guide for U.S. Elections: Adapting Quantitative Measures of the Preferences and Priorities of Political Elites to Help Voters Learn About Candidates, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 7, Big Data in Political Economy (November 2016), pp. 11-32
The “Odd Party Out” Theory of Certiorari
Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?
Ideology and Interests in the Political Marketplace
I develop a statistical method to measure the ideology of candidates and political action committees (PACs) using contribution data. The method recovers ideal points for incumbents that strongly correlate with ideological measures recovered from voting records, while simultaneously recovering positions for PACs, unsuccessful challengers, and open‐seat candidates. As the candidate ideal points are estimated independently of voting records, they re…
Why Hasn't Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality
During the past two generations, democratic forms have coexisted with massive increases in economic inequality in the United States and many other advanced democracies. Moreover, these new inequalities have primarily benefited the top 1 percent and even the top .01 percent. These groups seem sufficiently small that economic inequality could be held in check by political equality in the form of "one person, one vote." In this paper, we explore fiv…
The Punctuated Origins of Senate Polarization
This article uses a new dynamic ideal‐point estimation method that incorporates smoothing techniques to construct a more detailed account of Senate polarization. The results reveal that the Senate polarized in two distinct phases. Member replacement accounts for nearly all of the increase from the early 1970s through the mid‐1990s after which ideological adaptation emerges as the dominant force behind polarization. In addition, I find that a few …
Mapping the Ideological Marketplace
I develop a method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance data. Combined with a data set of over 100 million contribution records from state and federal elections, the method estimates ideal points for an expansive range of political actors. The common pool of contributors who give across institutions and levels of politics makes it possible to recover a unified set of ideological measures for members of Con…
Congressional Polarization and Its Connection to Income Inequality
This essay updates our findings on political polarization in Congress and elite political actors who work through Congress to affect public policy. We also link various threads of our research with the other essays in this volume. We begin with a discussion of the methodologies that enabled us to identify the emergence of political polarization in Congress, and then turn to substantive results.
Solutions to Political Polarization in America
Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from …
Measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire
This paper considers an innovative approach to measuring public spending preferences using an interactive budgeting questionnaire. After being presented with the President’s requested budget for the upcoming fiscal year, survey respondents were asked to adjust spending levels in line with their personal preferences, subject to budgetary trade-offs. An analysis of survey results reveals that responses sharply contrast with those recovered by tradi…
Senate Gate-Keeping, Presidential Staffing of “Inferior Offices,” and the Ideological Composition of Appointments to the Public Bureaucracy
Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives both the Senate and the President a role in the appointment of public bureaucrats. Yet, since the drafting of that constitutional passage, changes within the Senate and Executive have created new ways for officials to influence who gets appointed to the public bureaucracy. The Senate has developed intricate vetting procedures within its committees, while the Executive Branch has created new meth…
Polarized America
A Data-Driven Voter Guide for U.S. Elections
Adam Bonica, A Data-Driven Voter Guide for U.S. Elections: Adapting Quantitative Measures of the Preferences and Priorities of Political Elites to Help Voters Learn About Candidates, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 7, Big Data in Political Economy (November 2016), pp. 11-32
A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession
We extend the scaling methodology previously used in Bonica (2014) to jointly scale the American federal judiciary and legal profession in a common space with other political actors. The end result is the first dataset of consistently measured ideological scores across all tiers of the federal judiciary and the legal profession, including 840 federal judges and 380,307 attorneys. To illustrate these measures, we present two examples involving the…
Ideological Extremists in the U.S. Congress
In the last generation, congressional moderates have become ideologically more extreme over the course of their careers. We explain this “ideological migration” of moderates as a side effect of close partisan competition for control of the US House since 1994. Competition for the House caused activists, donors and, indirectly, voters to focus on the battle for majority status. Increased attention to partisan competition reduced individual members…
Inferring Roll‐Call Scores from Campaign Contributions Using Supervised Machine Learning
This article develops a generalized supervised learning methodology for inferring roll‐call scores from campaign contribution data. Rather than use unsupervised methods to recover a latent dimension that best explains patterns in giving, donation patterns are instead mapped onto a target measure of legislative voting behavior. Supervised models significantly outperform alternative measures of ideology in predicting legislative voting behavior. Fu…
Are Donation-Based Measures of Ideology Valid Predictors of Individual-Level Policy Preferences
This article validates donation-based measures of ideology against a rich battery of policy items from the Congressional Campaign Election Study. Donation-based measures are powerful predictors of policy preferences for a wide range of issues and successfully discriminate between donors from the same party. The overall predictive accuracy and relative improvement over party are comparable to what is achieved by scaling roll call votes in legislat…
Why Are There So Many Lawyers in Congress
Scholars have long sought to explain the overrepresentation of lawyers in Congress. This article draws on a wealth of data to explore the causes and consequences of this representational imbalance. While lawyers enter politics at higher rates, self‐selection at best provides a partial explanation. Conditional on running, lawyers win at twice the rate of candidates from other backgrounds. Contrary to prevailing theories in the literature, voters d…
All-mail voting in Colorado increases turnout and reduces turnout inequality
Estimating Judicial Ideology
We review the substantial literature on estimating judicial ideology, from the US Supreme Court to the lowest state court. As a way to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of various measures, we further analyze trends in judicial polarization within the US federal courts. Our analysis shows substantial gaps in the ideology of judges appointed by Republican Presidents versus those appointed by Democrats. Similar to trends in Congressional polariz…
The “Odd Party Out” Theory of Certiorari
Law (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Ideology (9 works) · Mathematics (8 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works)