Steve Jessee
Biographic Data
| ID | 339083 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steve Jessee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steve |
| FAMILY NAME | Jessee |
| SIGNATURE | JESSEE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3937-6123 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 393 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Asking about Complex Policies
As political issues have increased in complexity, public opinion researchers increasingly ask respondents about sophisticated political topics that may require substantive knowledge and analytic skills, raising concerns about survey satisficing. In this note, we examine the correlates of one manifestation of this kind of satisficing—response order effects, or when respondents are more likely to pick the top response options from a list. We do thi…
The impact of university attendance on partisanship
Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach …
Generalizing toward Nonrespondents: Effect Estimates in Survey Experiments Are Broadly Similar for Eager and Reluctant Participants
Survey experiments on probability samples are a popular method for investigating population-level causal questions due to their strong internal validity. However, lower survey response rates and an increased reliance on online convenience samples raise questions about the generalizability of survey experiments. We examine this concern using data from a collection of 50 survey experiments which represent a wide range of social science studies. Rec…
Higher Education and Cultural Liberalism: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Romania
Some studies suggest that university attendance exerts a liberalizing effect on attitudes toward cultural issues such as sexuality and sexual identity, prostitution, drug addiction, abortion, capital punishment, divorce, parenting, gender, race, religion, science, and technology. Other studies find only a weak effect or no effect. Divergent findings may stem from research designs that rest largely on observational data when assignment to treatmen…
Effects of a US Supreme Court ruling to restrict abortion rights
Moderator Placement in Survey Experiments: Racial Resentment and the “Welfare” versus “Assistance to the Poor” Question Wording Experiment
Researchers face difficult decisions about whether to ask potential moderators before or after a survey experiment. Competing concerns exist about priming respondents before the experiment and about introducing post-treatment bias. We replicate the classic “welfare” versus “assistance to the poor” survey experiment, randomly assigning respondents to be asked a battery of racial resentment questions either before or after the question wording expe…
Education and Social Capital
Early research suggested that education was a major factor in structuring rates of political participation and social capital. More recent work based on experimental or quasi-experimental evidence offers mixed findings. In this study, we enlist a unique research setting in Romania, where passing the baccalaureate is required for entrance into university, setting up the occasion for a fuzzy RD design. The sample is drawn from a cross section of Ro…
Estimating Individuals’ Political Perceptions While Adjusting for Differential Item Functioning
Questions about people’s perceptions of politicians or other political actors are of central interest in a wide variety of research areas. But measuring these perceptions is difficult in part because respondents may use survey response scales in different ways. In a classic article, Aldrich and McKelvey (1977) introduce a method adjusting for such differential item functioning by assuming that all respondents perceive political stimuli identicall…
Demographic Moderation of Spatial Voting in Presidential Elections
Using multiple large national surveys, we investigate how the relationship between policy-based ideology and vote choice in presidential elections differs across demographic groups. Specifically, we consider three key demographic characteristics: race, education, and gender. We find that large differences exist in the way ideology relates to presidential vote for voters from different racial groups. By contrast, we find quite small differences in…
Modeling spending preferences & public policy
(How) Can We Estimate the Ideology of Citizens and Political Elites on the Same Scale
Estimating the ideological positions of political elites on the same scale as those of ordinary citizens has great potential to increase our understanding of voting behavior, representation, and other political phenomena. There has been limited attention, however, to the fundamental issues, both practical and conceptual, involved in conducting these joint scalings, or to the sensitivity of these estimates to modeling assumptions and data choices.…
Don’t Know” Responses, Personality, and the Measurement of Political Knowledge
A prominent worry in the measurement of political knowledge is that respondents who say they don’t know the answer to a survey question may have partial knowledge about the topic—more than respondents who answer incorrectly but less than those who answer correctly. It has also been asserted that differentials in respondents’ willingness to guess, driven strongly by personality, can bias traditional knowledge measures. Using a multinomial probit i…
Ideological Proximity and Support for The Supreme Court
The two faces of congressional roll-call voting
Most analyses of congressional voting, whether theoretical or empirical, treat all roll-call votes in the same way. We argue that such approaches mask considerable variation in voting behaviour across different types of votes. In examining all roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 93rd to the 110th Congresses (1973–2008), we find that the forces affecting legislators’ voting on procedural and final passage matters have exh…
Public (Mis)Perceptions of Supreme Court Ideology
Journal Article Public (Mis)Perceptions of Supreme Court Ideology: A Method for Directly Comparing Citizens and Justices Get access Stephen Jessee, Stephen Jessee * Stephen Jessee is an assistant professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA. Neil Malhotra is an associate professor of political economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. The authors thank Brandon Bartels, Patrick Ega…
Ideology and Spatial Voting in American Elections
Ideology and Spatial Voting in American Elections addresses two core issues related to the foundations of democratic governance: how the political views of Americans are structured and how citizens' voting decisions relate to their ideological proximity to the candidates. Focusing on testing the assumptions and implications of spatial voting, this book connects the theory with empirical analysis of voter preferences and behavior, showing American…
Ps: Political Science and Politics Reviewers, 2011
In 2011, PS: Political Science and Politics published articles covering a vast range of topics. The journal's commitment to publishing articles on pedagogy and the profession, as well as exemplary topical scholarship on a spectrum of issues, call for an equally broad stable of reviewers. PS cannot publish such diverse work without the outstanding work (and openmindedness) of our peer reviewers. The peer-review process relies on the professionalis…
What Can We Learn About the Ideology of the Newest Supreme Court Justices
In this article, we present a principled method for updating estimates of the ideology of Supreme Court justices based on each new vote they cast. We apply this method to the ideological positions of the newly appointed members of the Court: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor. This approach allows us to gain not only an estimate of justices' ideologies but also a greater understanding of the level of uncertainty we should have about …
Partisan Bias, Political Information and Spatial Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election
This article provides direct estimates of the parameters of spatial utility models of voting using data from the 2008 presidential election. By measuring citizens' views on issues for which candidates' stances are known, I estimate voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. Using these estimates, I demonstrate that policy exerts a strong influence on vote choice for most voters. While independents appear to cast their ballots in acc…
Are Congressional Leaders Middlepersons or Extremists? Yes
Infuential theories of legislative organization predict that congressional leaders will be selected from the center of their parties. Yet previous research has generally rejected the “middleperson hypothesis,” finding leaders to be extremists. We challenged these findings by testing more‐appropriate null hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulation. We found that congressional leaders (and leadership candidates as a whole) tend to be closer to their par…
Voter Ideology and Candidate Positioning in the 2008 Presidential Election
Although classic Downsian theory predicts that candidates should converge to the ideological position of the median voter in the electorate, American elections generally feature major party candidates who offer divergent policy positions. Employing a survey and statistical estimation technique that allows for the estimation of the ideological position of candidates on the same scale as the distribution of voter ideology among voters, the author c…
Spatial Voting in the 2004 Presidential Election
The theory of spatial voting has played a large role in the development of important results across many areas of political science. Directly testing the foundational assumptions of spatial voting theory, however, has not been possible with existing data. Using a novel survey design, this article obtains estimates of voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. The results of this scaling demonstrate that voters possess meaningful ide…
Glottogenesis and Anatomically Modern Homo Sapiens: The Evidence for and Implications of a Late Origin of Vocal Language [and Comments and Replies]
Spatial Voting in the 2004 Presidential Election
The theory of spatial voting has played a large role in the development of important results across many areas of political science. Directly testing the foundational assumptions of spatial voting theory, however, has not been possible with existing data. Using a novel survey design, this article obtains estimates of voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. The results of this scaling demonstrate that voters possess meaningful ide…
Partisan Bias, Political Information and Spatial Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election
This article provides direct estimates of the parameters of spatial utility models of voting using data from the 2008 presidential election. By measuring citizens' views on issues for which candidates' stances are known, I estimate voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. Using these estimates, I demonstrate that policy exerts a strong influence on vote choice for most voters. While independents appear to cast their ballots in acc…
(How) Can We Estimate the Ideology of Citizens and Political Elites on the Same Scale
Estimating the ideological positions of political elites on the same scale as those of ordinary citizens has great potential to increase our understanding of voting behavior, representation, and other political phenomena. There has been limited attention, however, to the fundamental issues, both practical and conceptual, involved in conducting these joint scalings, or to the sensitivity of these estimates to modeling assumptions and data choices.…
Don’t Know” Responses, Personality, and the Measurement of Political Knowledge
A prominent worry in the measurement of political knowledge is that respondents who say they don’t know the answer to a survey question may have partial knowledge about the topic—more than respondents who answer incorrectly but less than those who answer correctly. It has also been asserted that differentials in respondents’ willingness to guess, driven strongly by personality, can bias traditional knowledge measures. Using a multinomial probit i…
Ideological Proximity and Support for The Supreme Court
The two faces of congressional roll-call voting
Most analyses of congressional voting, whether theoretical or empirical, treat all roll-call votes in the same way. We argue that such approaches mask considerable variation in voting behaviour across different types of votes. In examining all roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 93rd to the 110th Congresses (1973–2008), we find that the forces affecting legislators’ voting on procedural and final passage matters have exh…
Are Congressional Leaders Middlepersons or Extremists? Yes
Infuential theories of legislative organization predict that congressional leaders will be selected from the center of their parties. Yet previous research has generally rejected the “middleperson hypothesis,” finding leaders to be extremists. We challenged these findings by testing more‐appropriate null hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulation. We found that congressional leaders (and leadership candidates as a whole) tend to be closer to their par…
Public (Mis)Perceptions of Supreme Court Ideology
Journal Article Public (Mis)Perceptions of Supreme Court Ideology: A Method for Directly Comparing Citizens and Justices Get access Stephen Jessee, Stephen Jessee * Stephen Jessee is an assistant professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA. Neil Malhotra is an associate professor of political economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. The authors thank Brandon Bartels, Patrick Ega…
Glottogenesis and Anatomically Modern Homo Sapiens: The Evidence for and Implications of a Late Origin of Vocal Language [and Comments and Replies]
Higher Education and Cultural Liberalism: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Romania
Some studies suggest that university attendance exerts a liberalizing effect on attitudes toward cultural issues such as sexuality and sexual identity, prostitution, drug addiction, abortion, capital punishment, divorce, parenting, gender, race, religion, science, and technology. Other studies find only a weak effect or no effect. Divergent findings may stem from research designs that rest largely on observational data when assignment to treatmen…
Moderator Placement in Survey Experiments: Racial Resentment and the “Welfare” versus “Assistance to the Poor” Question Wording Experiment
Researchers face difficult decisions about whether to ask potential moderators before or after a survey experiment. Competing concerns exist about priming respondents before the experiment and about introducing post-treatment bias. We replicate the classic “welfare” versus “assistance to the poor” survey experiment, randomly assigning respondents to be asked a battery of racial resentment questions either before or after the question wording expe…
Modeling spending preferences & public policy
Estimating Individuals’ Political Perceptions While Adjusting for Differential Item Functioning
Questions about people’s perceptions of politicians or other political actors are of central interest in a wide variety of research areas. But measuring these perceptions is difficult in part because respondents may use survey response scales in different ways. In a classic article, Aldrich and McKelvey (1977) introduce a method adjusting for such differential item functioning by assuming that all respondents perceive political stimuli identicall…
Effects of a US Supreme Court ruling to restrict abortion rights
Education and Social Capital
Early research suggested that education was a major factor in structuring rates of political participation and social capital. More recent work based on experimental or quasi-experimental evidence offers mixed findings. In this study, we enlist a unique research setting in Romania, where passing the baccalaureate is required for entrance into university, setting up the occasion for a fuzzy RD design. The sample is drawn from a cross section of Ro…
Demographic Moderation of Spatial Voting in Presidential Elections
Using multiple large national surveys, we investigate how the relationship between policy-based ideology and vote choice in presidential elections differs across demographic groups. Specifically, we consider three key demographic characteristics: race, education, and gender. We find that large differences exist in the way ideology relates to presidential vote for voters from different racial groups. By contrast, we find quite small differences in…
Voter Ideology and Candidate Positioning in the 2008 Presidential Election
Although classic Downsian theory predicts that candidates should converge to the ideological position of the median voter in the electorate, American elections generally feature major party candidates who offer divergent policy positions. Employing a survey and statistical estimation technique that allows for the estimation of the ideological position of candidates on the same scale as the distribution of voter ideology among voters, the author c…
The impact of university attendance on partisanship
Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach …
Generalizing toward Nonrespondents: Effect Estimates in Survey Experiments Are Broadly Similar for Eager and Reluctant Participants
Survey experiments on probability samples are a popular method for investigating population-level causal questions due to their strong internal validity. However, lower survey response rates and an increased reliance on online convenience samples raise questions about the generalizability of survey experiments. We examine this concern using data from a collection of 50 survey experiments which represent a wide range of social science studies. Rec…
Ps: Political Science and Politics Reviewers, 2011
In 2011, PS: Political Science and Politics published articles covering a vast range of topics. The journal's commitment to publishing articles on pedagogy and the profession, as well as exemplary topical scholarship on a spectrum of issues, call for an equally broad stable of reviewers. PS cannot publish such diverse work without the outstanding work (and openmindedness) of our peer reviewers. The peer-review process relies on the professionalis…
Glottogenesis and Anatomically Modern Homo Sapiens: The Evidence for and Implications of a Late Origin of Vocal Language [and Comments and Replies]
Spatial Voting in the 2004 Presidential Election
The theory of spatial voting has played a large role in the development of important results across many areas of political science. Directly testing the foundational assumptions of spatial voting theory, however, has not been possible with existing data. Using a novel survey design, this article obtains estimates of voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. The results of this scaling demonstrate that voters possess meaningful ide…
Partisan Bias, Political Information and Spatial Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election
This article provides direct estimates of the parameters of spatial utility models of voting using data from the 2008 presidential election. By measuring citizens' views on issues for which candidates' stances are known, I estimate voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. Using these estimates, I demonstrate that policy exerts a strong influence on vote choice for most voters. While independents appear to cast their ballots in acc…
Are Congressional Leaders Middlepersons or Extremists? Yes
Infuential theories of legislative organization predict that congressional leaders will be selected from the center of their parties. Yet previous research has generally rejected the “middleperson hypothesis,” finding leaders to be extremists. We challenged these findings by testing more‐appropriate null hypotheses via Monte Carlo simulation. We found that congressional leaders (and leadership candidates as a whole) tend to be closer to their par…
Voter Ideology and Candidate Positioning in the 2008 Presidential Election
Although classic Downsian theory predicts that candidates should converge to the ideological position of the median voter in the electorate, American elections generally feature major party candidates who offer divergent policy positions. Employing a survey and statistical estimation technique that allows for the estimation of the ideological position of candidates on the same scale as the distribution of voter ideology among voters, the author c…
What Can We Learn About the Ideology of the Newest Supreme Court Justices
In this article, we present a principled method for updating estimates of the ideology of Supreme Court justices based on each new vote they cast. We apply this method to the ideological positions of the newly appointed members of the Court: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor. This approach allows us to gain not only an estimate of justices' ideologies but also a greater understanding of the level of uncertainty we should have about …
Ideology and Spatial Voting in American Elections
Ideology and Spatial Voting in American Elections addresses two core issues related to the foundations of democratic governance: how the political views of Americans are structured and how citizens' voting decisions relate to their ideological proximity to the candidates. Focusing on testing the assumptions and implications of spatial voting, this book connects the theory with empirical analysis of voter preferences and behavior, showing American…
Ps: Political Science and Politics Reviewers, 2011
In 2011, PS: Political Science and Politics published articles covering a vast range of topics. The journal's commitment to publishing articles on pedagogy and the profession, as well as exemplary topical scholarship on a spectrum of issues, call for an equally broad stable of reviewers. PS cannot publish such diverse work without the outstanding work (and openmindedness) of our peer reviewers. The peer-review process relies on the professionalis…
Public (Mis)Perceptions of Supreme Court Ideology
Journal Article Public (Mis)Perceptions of Supreme Court Ideology: A Method for Directly Comparing Citizens and Justices Get access Stephen Jessee, Stephen Jessee * Stephen Jessee is an assistant professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA. Neil Malhotra is an associate professor of political economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. The authors thank Brandon Bartels, Patrick Ega…
Ideological Proximity and Support for The Supreme Court
The two faces of congressional roll-call voting
Most analyses of congressional voting, whether theoretical or empirical, treat all roll-call votes in the same way. We argue that such approaches mask considerable variation in voting behaviour across different types of votes. In examining all roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 93rd to the 110th Congresses (1973–2008), we find that the forces affecting legislators’ voting on procedural and final passage matters have exh…
Don’t Know” Responses, Personality, and the Measurement of Political Knowledge
A prominent worry in the measurement of political knowledge is that respondents who say they don’t know the answer to a survey question may have partial knowledge about the topic—more than respondents who answer incorrectly but less than those who answer correctly. It has also been asserted that differentials in respondents’ willingness to guess, driven strongly by personality, can bias traditional knowledge measures. Using a multinomial probit i…
(How) Can We Estimate the Ideology of Citizens and Political Elites on the Same Scale
Estimating the ideological positions of political elites on the same scale as those of ordinary citizens has great potential to increase our understanding of voting behavior, representation, and other political phenomena. There has been limited attention, however, to the fundamental issues, both practical and conceptual, involved in conducting these joint scalings, or to the sensitivity of these estimates to modeling assumptions and data choices.…
Modeling spending preferences & public policy
Demographic Moderation of Spatial Voting in Presidential Elections
Using multiple large national surveys, we investigate how the relationship between policy-based ideology and vote choice in presidential elections differs across demographic groups. Specifically, we consider three key demographic characteristics: race, education, and gender. We find that large differences exist in the way ideology relates to presidential vote for voters from different racial groups. By contrast, we find quite small differences in…
Education and Social Capital
Early research suggested that education was a major factor in structuring rates of political participation and social capital. More recent work based on experimental or quasi-experimental evidence offers mixed findings. In this study, we enlist a unique research setting in Romania, where passing the baccalaureate is required for entrance into university, setting up the occasion for a fuzzy RD design. The sample is drawn from a cross section of Ro…
Estimating Individuals’ Political Perceptions While Adjusting for Differential Item Functioning
Questions about people’s perceptions of politicians or other political actors are of central interest in a wide variety of research areas. But measuring these perceptions is difficult in part because respondents may use survey response scales in different ways. In a classic article, Aldrich and McKelvey (1977) introduce a method adjusting for such differential item functioning by assuming that all respondents perceive political stimuli identicall…
Moderator Placement in Survey Experiments: Racial Resentment and the “Welfare” versus “Assistance to the Poor” Question Wording Experiment
Researchers face difficult decisions about whether to ask potential moderators before or after a survey experiment. Competing concerns exist about priming respondents before the experiment and about introducing post-treatment bias. We replicate the classic “welfare” versus “assistance to the poor” survey experiment, randomly assigning respondents to be asked a battery of racial resentment questions either before or after the question wording expe…
Higher Education and Cultural Liberalism: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Romania
Some studies suggest that university attendance exerts a liberalizing effect on attitudes toward cultural issues such as sexuality and sexual identity, prostitution, drug addiction, abortion, capital punishment, divorce, parenting, gender, race, religion, science, and technology. Other studies find only a weak effect or no effect. Divergent findings may stem from research designs that rest largely on observational data when assignment to treatmen…
Effects of a US Supreme Court ruling to restrict abortion rights
Asking about Complex Policies
As political issues have increased in complexity, public opinion researchers increasingly ask respondents about sophisticated political topics that may require substantive knowledge and analytic skills, raising concerns about survey satisficing. In this note, we examine the correlates of one manifestation of this kind of satisficing—response order effects, or when respondents are more likely to pick the top response options from a list. We do thi…
The impact of university attendance on partisanship
Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach …
Generalizing toward Nonrespondents: Effect Estimates in Survey Experiments Are Broadly Similar for Eager and Reluctant Participants
Survey experiments on probability samples are a popular method for investigating population-level causal questions due to their strong internal validity. However, lower survey response rates and an increased reliance on online convenience samples raise questions about the generalizability of survey experiments. We examine this concern using data from a collection of 50 survey experiments which represent a wide range of social science studies. Rec…
Political science (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Ideology (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Voting (8 works)