Jamie B Lewis
Biographic Data
| ID | 172930 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jamie B Lewis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jamie B |
| FAMILY NAME | Lewis |
| SIGNATURE | LEWIS J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2605-5010 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 781 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Accounting for Protest Voting in the U.S. Congress
Members of the majority party in Congress sometimes vote against bills that they prefer over the status quo. We estimate a model of congressional roll-call voting that allows for this kind of non-ideological protest voting. We find that protest voting has significant implications for roll-call-based estimates of ideology and other analyses that rely upon them. For example, a traditional item response theory model curiously identifies members of t…
How Partisan Are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records
Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter’s nationa…
Moderates
Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or hol…
The new Voteview.com
New Challenges, New Vision
The third edition of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies (Standards) challenge us to envision what “a more holistic, inclusive and intellectually challenging approach to preparing educators” might look like. This article discusses how the operating principles of a teacher education program parallel the commitments for educators found in the Standa…
The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting
Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll‐call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions…
PoLCA
poLCA is a software package for the estimation of latent class and latent class regression models for polytomous outcome variables, implemented in the R statistical computing environment. Both models can be called using a single simple command line. The basic latent class model is a finite mixture model in which the component distributions are assumed to be multi-way cross-classification tables with all variables mutually independent. The latent …
Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in DW-Nominate Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap
DW-NOMINATE scores for the U.S. Congress are widely used measures of legislators' ideological locations over time. These scores have been used in a large number of studies in political science and closely related fields. In this paper, we extend the work of Lewis and Poole (2004) on the parametric bootstrap to DW-NOMINATE and obtain standard errors for the legislator ideal points. These standard errors are in the range of 1%–4% of the range of DW…
Comparing Nominate and Ideal
Empirical models of spatial voting allow us to infer legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space using their roll‐call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the U.S. Congress, and legislative behavior more generally. There are now a number of alternative models, estimators, and software packages that researchers can use to recover latent issue or ideological spaces from voting data. The…
Did Ralph Nader Spoil Al Gore’s Presidential Bid? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election
The 2000 presidential race included two major party candidates - Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore - and two prominent third-party candidates - Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. Although it is often presumed that Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore by siphoning away votes that would have been cast for him in the absence of a Nader candidacy, we show that this presumption is rather misleading. A…
An Estimate of Risk Aversion in the U.S. Electorate
Recent work in political science has taken up the question of issue voting under conditions of uncertainty – situations in which voters have imperfect information about the policy positions of candidates. We move beyond the assumption of a particular spatial utility function and develop a model to estimate voters’ preferences for risk. Contrary to the maintained hypothesis in the literature, voters do not appear to have the strongly risk averse p…
Ideological Adaptation? The Survival Instinct of Threatened Legislators
Do legislators remain at one point on the ideological spectrum for their entire careers, or do they update their ideological positions in response to the demands of constituents? Although theories of the electoral connection predict that legislators should adapt to voter demands, most empirical studies instead show that they maintain consistent positions in the face of changing political conditions. This article takes advantage of the natural exp…
A Return to Normalcy? Revisiting the Effects of Term Limits on Competitiveness and Spending in California Assembly Elections
Term limits advocates argued that their reform would make state legislative campaigns more competitive and less expensive, and limited early studies suggested that it may have achieved those goals. But now, with evidence from more than a decade of experience with reform, we re-examine the effects of terms limits on electoral competitiveness and campaign spending in California Assembly elections. We find that while term limits initially suppressed…
Learning about Learning
We welcome the opportunity to respond to Wand's careful and detailed analysis of our paper (Lewis and Schultz 2003). With the discipline's increasing inclination to move toward fully structural strategic choice models (e.g., Signorino 1999; Morton 1999), the issues that Wand raises are important to consider, as they bear on crucial questions of model construction and interpretation. Moreover, his work has allowed us to consider more carefully the…
Legal Challenges to Segregated Education in Topeka, Kansas, 1903-1941
This article provides a brief overview of segregated education in Kansas and then explores 3 legal cases: (a) Reynolds v. The Board of Education of the City of Topeka (1903), (b) Wright v. Board of Education of Topeka (1930), and (c) Graham v. Board of Education of Topeka (1941), the precursors to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). These lawsuits, brought by Black citizens in Topeka, Kansas, provide insights into the legal chal…
Estimating Regression Models in Which the Dependent Variable Is Based on Estimates
Researchers often use as dependent variables quantities estimated from auxiliary data sets. Estimated dependent variable (EDV) models arise, for example, in studies where counties or states are the units of analysis and the dependent variable is an estimated mean, proportion, or regression coefficient. Scholars fitting EDV models have generally recognized that variation in the sampling variance of the observations on the dependent variable will i…
Beyond the Median
Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique data set consisting of individual‐level voting data t…
Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap
Over the last 15 years a large amount of scholarship in legislative politics has used NOMINATE or other similar methods to construct measures of legislators' ideological locations. These measures are then used in subsequent analyses. Recent work in political methodology has focused on the pitfalls of using such estimates as variables in subsequent analysis without explicitly accounting for their uncertainty and possible bias (Herron and Shotts 20…
Revealing Preferences
We develop an empirical estimator directly from an extensive-form crisis bargaining game with incomplete information and discuss its features and limitations. The estimator makes it possible to draw inferences about states' payoffs from observational data on crisis outcomes while remaining faithful to the theorized strategic and informational structure. We compare this estimator to one based on a symmetric information version of the same game, us…
Learning to Interview in the Social Sciences
A large proportion of social science investigations rely on interview data, yet few researchers received formal training in interviewing. The authors investigated how novice researchers developed their interview skills, reporting on postgraduate students' experiences and reflections during an intensive 15-day interview course. Data analyzed for the article include audiotapes and transcripts of in-depth interviews and students' written critiques a…
Understanding King's Ecological Inference Model a Method-of-Moments Approach
Key Words: ecological inferencerandom coefficientsaggregate voting dataCalifornia assembly elections
Social Justice, Social Studies, and Social Foundations
Estimating Voter Preference Distributions from Individual-Level Voting Data
This paper presents a method for inferring the distribution of voter ideal points on a single dimension from individual-level binary choice data. The statistical model and estimation technique draw heavily on the psychometric literature on test taking and, in particular, on the work of Bock and Aitkin (1981) and are similar to several recent methods of estimating legislative ideal points (Londregan 2000; Bailey 2001). I present Monte Carlo result…
No Evidence on Directional vs. Proximity Voting
The directional and proximity models offer dramatically different theories for how voters make decisions and fundamentally divergent views of the supposed microfoundations on which vast bodies of literature in theoretical rational choice and empirical political behavior have been built. We demonstrate here that the empirical tests in the large and growing body of literature on this subject amount to theoretical debates about which statistical ass…
Estimating Regression Models in Which the Dependent Variable Is Based on Estimates
Researchers often use as dependent variables quantities estimated from auxiliary data sets. Estimated dependent variable (EDV) models arise, for example, in studies where counties or states are the units of analysis and the dependent variable is an estimated mean, proportion, or regression coefficient. Scholars fitting EDV models have generally recognized that variation in the sampling variance of the observations on the dependent variable will i…
Beyond the Median
Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique data set consisting of individual‐level voting data t…
No Evidence on Directional vs. Proximity Voting
The directional and proximity models offer dramatically different theories for how voters make decisions and fundamentally divergent views of the supposed microfoundations on which vast bodies of literature in theoretical rational choice and empirical political behavior have been built. We demonstrate here that the empirical tests in the large and growing body of literature on this subject amount to theoretical debates about which statistical ass…
Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap
Over the last 15 years a large amount of scholarship in legislative politics has used NOMINATE or other similar methods to construct measures of legislators' ideological locations. These measures are then used in subsequent analyses. Recent work in political methodology has focused on the pitfalls of using such estimates as variables in subsequent analysis without explicitly accounting for their uncertainty and possible bias (Herron and Shotts 20…
Ideological Adaptation? The Survival Instinct of Threatened Legislators
Do legislators remain at one point on the ideological spectrum for their entire careers, or do they update their ideological positions in response to the demands of constituents? Although theories of the electoral connection predict that legislators should adapt to voter demands, most empirical studies instead show that they maintain consistent positions in the face of changing political conditions. This article takes advantage of the natural exp…
Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in DW-Nominate Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap
DW-NOMINATE scores for the U.S. Congress are widely used measures of legislators' ideological locations over time. These scores have been used in a large number of studies in political science and closely related fields. In this paper, we extend the work of Lewis and Poole (2004) on the parametric bootstrap to DW-NOMINATE and obtain standard errors for the legislator ideal points. These standard errors are in the range of 1%–4% of the range of DW…
Revealing Preferences
We develop an empirical estimator directly from an extensive-form crisis bargaining game with incomplete information and discuss its features and limitations. The estimator makes it possible to draw inferences about states' payoffs from observational data on crisis outcomes while remaining faithful to the theorized strategic and informational structure. We compare this estimator to one based on a symmetric information version of the same game, us…
Learning to Interview in the Social Sciences
A large proportion of social science investigations rely on interview data, yet few researchers received formal training in interviewing. The authors investigated how novice researchers developed their interview skills, reporting on postgraduate students' experiences and reflections during an intensive 15-day interview course. Data analyzed for the article include audiotapes and transcripts of in-depth interviews and students' written critiques a…
Moderates
Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or hol…
Comparing Nominate and Ideal
Empirical models of spatial voting allow us to infer legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space using their roll‐call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the U.S. Congress, and legislative behavior more generally. There are now a number of alternative models, estimators, and software packages that researchers can use to recover latent issue or ideological spaces from voting data. The…
The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting
Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll‐call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions…
An Estimate of Risk Aversion in the U.S. Electorate
Recent work in political science has taken up the question of issue voting under conditions of uncertainty – situations in which voters have imperfect information about the policy positions of candidates. We move beyond the assumption of a particular spatial utility function and develop a model to estimate voters’ preferences for risk. Contrary to the maintained hypothesis in the literature, voters do not appear to have the strongly risk averse p…
Estimating Voter Preference Distributions from Individual-Level Voting Data
This paper presents a method for inferring the distribution of voter ideal points on a single dimension from individual-level binary choice data. The statistical model and estimation technique draw heavily on the psychometric literature on test taking and, in particular, on the work of Bock and Aitkin (1981) and are similar to several recent methods of estimating legislative ideal points (Londregan 2000; Bailey 2001). I present Monte Carlo result…
Did Ralph Nader Spoil Al Gore’s Presidential Bid? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election
The 2000 presidential race included two major party candidates - Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore - and two prominent third-party candidates - Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. Although it is often presumed that Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore by siphoning away votes that would have been cast for him in the absence of a Nader candidacy, we show that this presumption is rather misleading. A…
A Return to Normalcy? Revisiting the Effects of Term Limits on Competitiveness and Spending in California Assembly Elections
Term limits advocates argued that their reform would make state legislative campaigns more competitive and less expensive, and limited early studies suggested that it may have achieved those goals. But now, with evidence from more than a decade of experience with reform, we re-examine the effects of terms limits on electoral competitiveness and campaign spending in California Assembly elections. We find that while term limits initially suppressed…
New Challenges, New Vision
The third edition of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies (Standards) challenge us to envision what “a more holistic, inclusive and intellectually challenging approach to preparing educators” might look like. This article discusses how the operating principles of a teacher education program parallel the commitments for educators found in the Standa…
Social Justice, Social Studies, and Social Foundations
The new Voteview.com
Learning about Learning
We welcome the opportunity to respond to Wand's careful and detailed analysis of our paper (Lewis and Schultz 2003). With the discipline's increasing inclination to move toward fully structural strategic choice models (e.g., Signorino 1999; Morton 1999), the issues that Wand raises are important to consider, as they bear on crucial questions of model construction and interpretation. Moreover, his work has allowed us to consider more carefully the…
No Evidence on Directional vs. Proximity Voting
The directional and proximity models offer dramatically different theories for how voters make decisions and fundamentally divergent views of the supposed microfoundations on which vast bodies of literature in theoretical rational choice and empirical political behavior have been built. We demonstrate here that the empirical tests in the large and growing body of literature on this subject amount to theoretical debates about which statistical ass…
Understanding King's Ecological Inference Model a Method-of-Moments Approach
Key Words: ecological inferencerandom coefficientsaggregate voting dataCalifornia assembly elections
Social Justice, Social Studies, and Social Foundations
Estimating Voter Preference Distributions from Individual-Level Voting Data
This paper presents a method for inferring the distribution of voter ideal points on a single dimension from individual-level binary choice data. The statistical model and estimation technique draw heavily on the psychometric literature on test taking and, in particular, on the work of Bock and Aitkin (1981) and are similar to several recent methods of estimating legislative ideal points (Londregan 2000; Bailey 2001). I present Monte Carlo result…
Revealing Preferences
We develop an empirical estimator directly from an extensive-form crisis bargaining game with incomplete information and discuss its features and limitations. The estimator makes it possible to draw inferences about states' payoffs from observational data on crisis outcomes while remaining faithful to the theorized strategic and informational structure. We compare this estimator to one based on a symmetric information version of the same game, us…
Learning to Interview in the Social Sciences
A large proportion of social science investigations rely on interview data, yet few researchers received formal training in interviewing. The authors investigated how novice researchers developed their interview skills, reporting on postgraduate students' experiences and reflections during an intensive 15-day interview course. Data analyzed for the article include audiotapes and transcripts of in-depth interviews and students' written critiques a…
Beyond the Median
Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique data set consisting of individual‐level voting data t…
Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap
Over the last 15 years a large amount of scholarship in legislative politics has used NOMINATE or other similar methods to construct measures of legislators' ideological locations. These measures are then used in subsequent analyses. Recent work in political methodology has focused on the pitfalls of using such estimates as variables in subsequent analysis without explicitly accounting for their uncertainty and possible bias (Herron and Shotts 20…
Learning about Learning
We welcome the opportunity to respond to Wand's careful and detailed analysis of our paper (Lewis and Schultz 2003). With the discipline's increasing inclination to move toward fully structural strategic choice models (e.g., Signorino 1999; Morton 1999), the issues that Wand raises are important to consider, as they bear on crucial questions of model construction and interpretation. Moreover, his work has allowed us to consider more carefully the…
Legal Challenges to Segregated Education in Topeka, Kansas, 1903-1941
This article provides a brief overview of segregated education in Kansas and then explores 3 legal cases: (a) Reynolds v. The Board of Education of the City of Topeka (1903), (b) Wright v. Board of Education of Topeka (1930), and (c) Graham v. Board of Education of Topeka (1941), the precursors to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). These lawsuits, brought by Black citizens in Topeka, Kansas, provide insights into the legal chal…
Estimating Regression Models in Which the Dependent Variable Is Based on Estimates
Researchers often use as dependent variables quantities estimated from auxiliary data sets. Estimated dependent variable (EDV) models arise, for example, in studies where counties or states are the units of analysis and the dependent variable is an estimated mean, proportion, or regression coefficient. Scholars fitting EDV models have generally recognized that variation in the sampling variance of the observations on the dependent variable will i…
Did Ralph Nader Spoil Al Gore’s Presidential Bid? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election
The 2000 presidential race included two major party candidates - Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore - and two prominent third-party candidates - Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. Although it is often presumed that Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore by siphoning away votes that would have been cast for him in the absence of a Nader candidacy, we show that this presumption is rather misleading. A…
An Estimate of Risk Aversion in the U.S. Electorate
Recent work in political science has taken up the question of issue voting under conditions of uncertainty – situations in which voters have imperfect information about the policy positions of candidates. We move beyond the assumption of a particular spatial utility function and develop a model to estimate voters’ preferences for risk. Contrary to the maintained hypothesis in the literature, voters do not appear to have the strongly risk averse p…
Ideological Adaptation? The Survival Instinct of Threatened Legislators
Do legislators remain at one point on the ideological spectrum for their entire careers, or do they update their ideological positions in response to the demands of constituents? Although theories of the electoral connection predict that legislators should adapt to voter demands, most empirical studies instead show that they maintain consistent positions in the face of changing political conditions. This article takes advantage of the natural exp…
A Return to Normalcy? Revisiting the Effects of Term Limits on Competitiveness and Spending in California Assembly Elections
Term limits advocates argued that their reform would make state legislative campaigns more competitive and less expensive, and limited early studies suggested that it may have achieved those goals. But now, with evidence from more than a decade of experience with reform, we re-examine the effects of terms limits on electoral competitiveness and campaign spending in California Assembly elections. We find that while term limits initially suppressed…
Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in DW-Nominate Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap
DW-NOMINATE scores for the U.S. Congress are widely used measures of legislators' ideological locations over time. These scores have been used in a large number of studies in political science and closely related fields. In this paper, we extend the work of Lewis and Poole (2004) on the parametric bootstrap to DW-NOMINATE and obtain standard errors for the legislator ideal points. These standard errors are in the range of 1%–4% of the range of DW…
Comparing Nominate and Ideal
Empirical models of spatial voting allow us to infer legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space using their roll‐call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the U.S. Congress, and legislative behavior more generally. There are now a number of alternative models, estimators, and software packages that researchers can use to recover latent issue or ideological spaces from voting data. The…
PoLCA
poLCA is a software package for the estimation of latent class and latent class regression models for polytomous outcome variables, implemented in the R statistical computing environment. Both models can be called using a single simple command line. The basic latent class model is a finite mixture model in which the component distributions are assumed to be multi-way cross-classification tables with all variables mutually independent. The latent …
New Challenges, New Vision
The third edition of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies (Standards) challenge us to envision what “a more holistic, inclusive and intellectually challenging approach to preparing educators” might look like. This article discusses how the operating principles of a teacher education program parallel the commitments for educators found in the Standa…
The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting
Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll‐call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions…
The new Voteview.com
Moderates
Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or hol…
How Partisan Are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records
Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter’s nationa…
Accounting for Protest Voting in the U.S. Congress
Members of the majority party in Congress sometimes vote against bills that they prefer over the status quo. We estimate a model of congressional roll-call voting that allows for this kind of non-ideological protest voting. We find that protest voting has significant implications for roll-call-based estimates of ideology and other analyses that rely upon them. For example, a traditional item response theory model curiously identifies members of t…
Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Voting (12 works) · Econometrics (11 works) · Economics (11 works) · Mathematics (10 works)