Brandon Stewart
Biographic Data
| ID | 3684871 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brandon Stewart |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brandon |
| FAMILY NAME | Stewart |
| SIGNATURE | STEWART B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2047 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Fine-tuned large language models can replicate expert coding better than trained coders: A study on informative signals sent by interest groups
Understanding how political information is transmitted requires tools that can reliably and scalably capture complex signals in text. While existing studies highlight interest groups as strategic information providers, empirical analysis has been constrained by reliance on expert annotation. Using policy documents released by interest groups, this study shows that fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) outperform lightly trained workers, crowdwo…
Handle with Care: A Sociologist’s Guide to Causal Inference with Instrumental Variables
Instrumental variables (IV) analysis is a powerful, but fragile, tool for drawing causal inferences from observational data. Sociologists increasingly turn to this strategy in settings where unmeasured confounding between the treatment and outcome is likely. This paper reviews the assumptions required for IV and the consequences of violating them, focusing on sociological applications. We highlight three methodological problems IV faces: (i) iden…
The effects of ethnic diversity and polarization on turnout in student government elections
Measuring Distances in High Dimensional Spaces: Why Average Group Vector Comparisons Exhibit Bias, And What to Do about it
Analysts often seek to compare representations in high-dimensional space, e.g., embedding vectors of the same word across groups. We show that the distance measures calculated in such cases can exhibit considerable statistical bias, that stems from uncertainty in the estimation of the elements of those vectors. This problem applies to Euclidean distance, cosine similarity, and other similar measures. After illustrating the severity of this proble…
What Good Is a Regression? Inference to the Best Explanation and the Practice of Political Science Research
Multilanguage Word Embeddings for Social Scientists: Estimation, Inference, and Validation Resources for 157 Languages
Word embeddings are now a vital resource for social science research. However, obtaining high-quality training data for non-English languages can be difficult, and fitting embeddings therein may be computationally expensive. In addition, social scientists typically want to make statistical comparisons and do hypothesis tests on embeddings, yet this is nontrivial with current approaches. We provide three new data resources designed to ameliorate t…
Correcting the Measurement Errors of AI-Assisted Labeling in Image Analysis Using Design-Based Supervised Learning
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has shown incredible leaps in performance across data of a variety of modalities including texts, images, audio, and videos. This affords social scientists the ability to annotate variables of interest from unstructured media. While rapidly improving, these methods are far from perfect and, as we show, even ignoring the small amounts of error in high accuracy systems can lead to substantial bias and invalid…
Explaining Russian state-sponsored disinformation campaigns: Who Is Targeted and Why
In this paper, we empirically examine the explanations for the frequency of Russian disinformation attacks on countries in Europe or the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union from 2015 to 2021. Using negative binomial regression analysis, we find that disinformation attacks are most frequent when (1) a country was holding a national election in that year, and (2) if that country was experiencing significant political unrest. These…
Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails: Evidence from 300K emails from the 2020 US election cycle
We collect and analyze a corpus of more than 300,000 political emails sent during the 2020 US election cycle. These emails were sent by over 3000 political campaigns and organizations including federal and state level candidates as well as Political Action Committees. We find that in this corpus, manipulative tactics-techniques using some level of deception or clickbait-are the norm, not the exception. We measure six specific tactics senders use …
Embedding Regression: Models for Context-Specific Description and Inference
Social scientists commonly seek to make statements about how word use varies over circumstances-including time, partisan identity, or some other document-level covariate. For example, researchers might wish to know how Republicans and Democrats diverge in their understanding of the term "immigration." Building on the success of pretrained language models, we introduce the à la carte on text (conText) embedding regression model for this purpose. T…
Topics, Concepts, and Measurement: A Crowdsourced Procedure for Validating Topics as Measures
Topic models, as developed in computer science, are effective tools for exploring and summarizing large document collections. When applied in social science research, however, they are commonly used for measurement, a task that requires careful validation to ensure that the model outputs actually capture the desired concept of interest. In this paper, we review current practices for topic validation in the field and show that extensive model vali…
Turning discontent into votes: Economic inequality and ethnic outbidding
Ethnic outbidding, where parties adopt ever more extreme positions to capture electoral advantage, has become an increasingly common practice among ethnic parties. As economic issues have often served as a catalyst for ethnic tension, increasing levels of economic inequality should lead parties to adopt more extreme positions in an attempt to outbid one another. Furthermore, as their economic and ethnic platforms will appeal to the same ethnicall…
Organization and the structure of opportunities: Understanding the success of ethnic parties in postcommunist Europe
In this article, we formulate a theoretical framework that examines the “internal” organizational characteristics of ethnic minority political parties, the characteristics of the ethnic minority group they purport to represent, and the external environment that these parties face, to explain the political success of these parties. As an empirical plausibility probe of this framework, we use data from 1991 to 2016 for 41 ethnic minority parties ac…
Machine Learning for Social Science: An Agnostic Approach
Social scientists are now in an era of data abundance, and machine learning tools are increasingly used to extract meaning from data sets both massive and small. We explain how the inclusion of machine learning in the social sciences requires us to rethink not only applications of machine learning methods but also best practices in the social sciences. In contrast to the traditional tasks for machine learning in computer science and statistics, w…
What Is Your Estimand? Defining the Target Quantity Connects Statistical Evidence to Theory
We make only one point in this article. Every quantitative study must be able to answer the question: what is your estimand? The estimand is the target quantity-the purpose of the statistical analysis. Much attention is already placed on how to do estimation; a similar degree of care should be given to defining the thing we are estimating. We advocate that authors state the central quantity of each analysis-the theoretical estimand-in precise ter…
Wrestling with Complexity in Computational Social Science: Theory, Estimation and Representation
What Do We Know about Ethnic Outbidding? We Need to Take Ideology Seriously
The term “ethnic outbidding” refers to an auction-like process where ethnically-based political parties adopt extreme ideological positions as a means of distancing themselves from rival parties. While a lot of research references ethnic outbidding, very little empirical analysis actually assesses the ability of the outbidding model to explain the actions of ethnic political parties. More generally, existing research on outbidding fails to accoun…
Adjusting for Confounding with Text Matching
We identify situations in which conditioning on text can address confounding in observational studies. We argue that a matching approach is particularly well‐suited to this task, but existing matching methods are ill‐equipped to handle high‐dimensional text data. Our proposed solution is to estimate a low‐dimensional summary of the text and condition on this summary via matching. We propose a method of text matching, topical inverse regression ma…
STM: An R Package for Structural Topic Models
This paper demonstrates how to use the R package stm for structural topic modeling. The structural topic model allows researchers to flexibly estimate a topic model that includes document-level metadata. Estimation is accomplished through a fast variational approximation. The stm package provides many useful features, including rich ways to explore topics, estimate uncertainty, and visualize quantities of interest.
Ethnic Party Candidate Performance in Local Elections: Evidence from Romania and Slovakia
This article assesses the effects of candidate gender, incumbency, and local ethnic composition on the electoral performance of ethnic party candidates in mayoral elections in Romania and Slovakia. The results of my statistical analysis indicate that candidate gender has a minimal effect on electoral performance, whereas incumbency and local ethnic composition have a large and statistically significant effect. My findings also suggest that more e…
Secessionism and Terrorism: Bombs, Blood, and Independence in Europe and Eurasia
Secessionism and Terrorism: Bombs, Blood, and Independence in Europe and Eurasia." Terrorism and Political Violence, 31(4), pp. 906–907
Structural Inequality and Ethnic Bloc Voting
Objective A large body of ethnic politics literature suggests that horizontal inequalities exacerbate ethnic conflict. However, the relationship between intergroup inequality and ethnic bloc voting behavior has escaped empirical analysis. We test the relationship between ethnic bloc voting and horizontal inequality by examining how relative disparity affects individuals’ probability of supporting the same political party as other co‐ethnics. Meth…
What Makes Foreign Policy Teams Tick: Explaining Variation in Group Performance at Geopolitical Forecasting
When do groups—be they countries, administrations, or other organizations—more or less accurately understand the world around them and assess political choices? Some argue that group decision-making processes often fail due to biases induced by groupthink. Others argue that groups, by aggregating knowledge, are better at analyzing the foreign policy world. To advance knowledge about the intersection of politics and group decision making, this pap…
From adversaries to allies: Ethnic gerrymandering and ethnic party behaviour in local elections in Macedonia
Constitutional designers often construct political institutions to provide greater autonomy to ethnic minority groups. One tool available to constitutional designers is ‘ethnic gerrymandering’, where the boundaries of local government units are altered to provide greater representation to minority groups. This paper analyses the effects of changes in the ethnic composition of municipalities, which occur as a result of ethnic gerrymandering, on et…
Holocaust History, Far-Right Parties, and Antisemitic Incidents
Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts
Politics and political conflict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have hindered their use in political science research. Here lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many i…
Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses
Collection and especially analysis of open‐ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it …
Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics
Recent advances in research tools for the systematic analysis of textual data are enabling exciting new research throughout the social sciences. For comparative politics, scholars who are often interested in non-English and possibly multilingual textual datasets, these advances may be difficult to access. This article discusses practical issues that arise in the processing, management, translation, and analysis of textual data with a particular f…
What Is Your Estimand? Defining the Target Quantity Connects Statistical Evidence to Theory
We make only one point in this article. Every quantitative study must be able to answer the question: what is your estimand? The estimand is the target quantity-the purpose of the statistical analysis. Much attention is already placed on how to do estimation; a similar degree of care should be given to defining the thing we are estimating. We advocate that authors state the central quantity of each analysis-the theoretical estimand-in precise ter…
Machine Learning for Social Science: An Agnostic Approach
Social scientists are now in an era of data abundance, and machine learning tools are increasingly used to extract meaning from data sets both massive and small. We explain how the inclusion of machine learning in the social sciences requires us to rethink not only applications of machine learning methods but also best practices in the social sciences. In contrast to the traditional tasks for machine learning in computer science and statistics, w…
Choosing Your Neighbors: Networks of Diffusion in International Relations1
In examining the diffusion of social and political phenomena like regime transition, conflict, and policy change, scholars routinely make choices about how proximity is defined and which neighbors should be considered more important than others. Since each specification offers an alternative view of the networks through which diffusion can take place, one's decision can exert a significant influence on the magnitude and scope of estimated diffusi…
Embedding Regression: Models for Context-Specific Description and Inference
Social scientists commonly seek to make statements about how word use varies over circumstances-including time, partisan identity, or some other document-level covariate. For example, researchers might wish to know how Republicans and Democrats diverge in their understanding of the term "immigration." Building on the success of pretrained language models, we introduce the à la carte on text (conText) embedding regression model for this purpose. T…
The Global Diffusion of Law: Transnational Crime and the Case of Human Trafficking
In the past few decades new laws criminalizing certain transnational activities have proliferated: from money laundering, corruption, and insider trading to trafficking in weapons and drugs. Human trafficking is one example. We argue that criminalization of trafficking in persons has diffused in large part because of the way the issue has been framed: primarily as a problem of organized crime rather than predominantly an egregious human rights ab…
Use of force and civil–military relations in Russia: An automated content analysis
Russia's intervention in the Georgian–South Ossetian conflict has highlighted the need to rigorously examine trends in the public debate over the use of force in Russia. Approaching this debate through the prism of civil–military relations, we take advantage of recent methodological advances in automated content analysis and generate a new dataset of 8000 public statements made by Russia's political and military leaders during the Putin period. T…
Topics, Concepts, and Measurement: A Crowdsourced Procedure for Validating Topics as Measures
Topic models, as developed in computer science, are effective tools for exploring and summarizing large document collections. When applied in social science research, however, they are commonly used for measurement, a task that requires careful validation to ensure that the model outputs actually capture the desired concept of interest. In this paper, we review current practices for topic validation in the field and show that extensive model vali…
Adjusting for Confounding with Text Matching
We identify situations in which conditioning on text can address confounding in observational studies. We argue that a matching approach is particularly well‐suited to this task, but existing matching methods are ill‐equipped to handle high‐dimensional text data. Our proposed solution is to estimate a low‐dimensional summary of the text and condition on this summary via matching. We propose a method of text matching, topical inverse regression ma…
Predicting Risk Factors Associated with Forced Migration: An Early Warning Model of Haitian Flight
This study predicts forced migration events by predicting the civil violence, poor economic conditions, and foreign interventions known to cause individuals to flee their homes in search of refuge. If we can predict forced migration, policy-makers can better plan for humanitarian crises. While the study is limited to predicting Haitian flight to the United States, its strength is its ability to predict weekly flows as opposed to annual flows, pro…
Organization and the structure of opportunities: Understanding the success of ethnic parties in postcommunist Europe
In this article, we formulate a theoretical framework that examines the “internal” organizational characteristics of ethnic minority political parties, the characteristics of the ethnic minority group they purport to represent, and the external environment that these parties face, to explain the political success of these parties. As an empirical plausibility probe of this framework, we use data from 1991 to 2016 for 41 ethnic minority parties ac…
From adversaries to allies: Ethnic gerrymandering and ethnic party behaviour in local elections in Macedonia
Constitutional designers often construct political institutions to provide greater autonomy to ethnic minority groups. One tool available to constitutional designers is ‘ethnic gerrymandering’, where the boundaries of local government units are altered to provide greater representation to minority groups. This paper analyses the effects of changes in the ethnic composition of municipalities, which occur as a result of ethnic gerrymandering, on et…
What Do We Know about Ethnic Outbidding? We Need to Take Ideology Seriously
The term “ethnic outbidding” refers to an auction-like process where ethnically-based political parties adopt extreme ideological positions as a means of distancing themselves from rival parties. While a lot of research references ethnic outbidding, very little empirical analysis actually assesses the ability of the outbidding model to explain the actions of ethnic political parties. More generally, existing research on outbidding fails to accoun…
What Makes Foreign Policy Teams Tick: Explaining Variation in Group Performance at Geopolitical Forecasting
When do groups—be they countries, administrations, or other organizations—more or less accurately understand the world around them and assess political choices? Some argue that group decision-making processes often fail due to biases induced by groupthink. Others argue that groups, by aggregating knowledge, are better at analyzing the foreign policy world. To advance knowledge about the intersection of politics and group decision making, this pap…
Does Conflict Lead to Ethnic Particularism? Electoral Violence and Ethnicity in Kenya 2005–2008
What impact does violence have on ethnic identity? Do acts of violence tend to create greater segmentation and “hardening” of identities among ethnic groups? In this article, we empirically assess the claim that violence inevitably leads to the hardening of ethnic identity (which we operationalize as expressions of ethnic particularism over a national identity). Using survey data from Kenya covering the period 2005–2008, integrated with geocoded …
What Good Is a Regression? Inference to the Best Explanation and the Practice of Political Science Research
Political Persecution or Economic Deprivation? A Time-Series Analysis of Haitian Exodus, 1990—2004
This study addresses the factors that lead individuals to flee their homes in search of refuge. Many argue that individuals abandon their homes in favor of an uncertain life elsewhere because of economic hardship, while others argue that threats to their lives, physical person, and liberty cause them to flee. This study engages the debate by analyzing flight patterns over time from Haiti to the United States as a function of economic and security…
Political Mobilization and Government Targeting: When Do Dissidents Challenge the State
Activist groups face a number of strategic challenges when pursuing social change. Among the most important is selecting the appropriate target for protest activity. Yet, scholars have typically focused on dissident–government interactions, rather than the entire range of potential targets. Why, then, do dissidents choose to target the state rather than other social actors such as firms, rival ethnic groups, the press, and so on? We argue that di…
Handle with Care: A Sociologist’s Guide to Causal Inference with Instrumental Variables
Instrumental variables (IV) analysis is a powerful, but fragile, tool for drawing causal inferences from observational data. Sociologists increasingly turn to this strategy in settings where unmeasured confounding between the treatment and outcome is likely. This paper reviews the assumptions required for IV and the consequences of violating them, focusing on sociological applications. We highlight three methodological problems IV faces: (i) iden…
Turning discontent into votes: Economic inequality and ethnic outbidding
Ethnic outbidding, where parties adopt ever more extreme positions to capture electoral advantage, has become an increasingly common practice among ethnic parties. As economic issues have often served as a catalyst for ethnic tension, increasing levels of economic inequality should lead parties to adopt more extreme positions in an attempt to outbid one another. Furthermore, as their economic and ethnic platforms will appeal to the same ethnicall…
Correcting the Measurement Errors of AI-Assisted Labeling in Image Analysis Using Design-Based Supervised Learning
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has shown incredible leaps in performance across data of a variety of modalities including texts, images, audio, and videos. This affords social scientists the ability to annotate variables of interest from unstructured media. While rapidly improving, these methods are far from perfect and, as we show, even ignoring the small amounts of error in high accuracy systems can lead to substantial bias and invalid…
Foreign threat and political party change: Russia and changes in party manifestos
How do political parties react to foreign security threats? There has been very little attention paid in the literature generally to how parties react to international events, particularly how parties react to foreign policy threats. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, we examine how political parties in countries in Europe have reacted to Russian actions in terms of their emphasis on security issues. Based upon our analysis of the…
Multilanguage Word Embeddings for Social Scientists: Estimation, Inference, and Validation Resources for 157 Languages
Word embeddings are now a vital resource for social science research. However, obtaining high-quality training data for non-English languages can be difficult, and fitting embeddings therein may be computationally expensive. In addition, social scientists typically want to make statistical comparisons and do hypothesis tests on embeddings, yet this is nontrivial with current approaches. We provide three new data resources designed to ameliorate t…
Predicting Risk Factors Associated with Forced Migration: An Early Warning Model of Haitian Flight
This study predicts forced migration events by predicting the civil violence, poor economic conditions, and foreign interventions known to cause individuals to flee their homes in search of refuge. If we can predict forced migration, policy-makers can better plan for humanitarian crises. While the study is limited to predicting Haitian flight to the United States, its strength is its ability to predict weekly flows as opposed to annual flows, pro…
Political Persecution or Economic Deprivation? A Time-Series Analysis of Haitian Exodus, 1990—2004
This study addresses the factors that lead individuals to flee their homes in search of refuge. Many argue that individuals abandon their homes in favor of an uncertain life elsewhere because of economic hardship, while others argue that threats to their lives, physical person, and liberty cause them to flee. This study engages the debate by analyzing flight patterns over time from Haiti to the United States as a function of economic and security…
Use of force and civil–military relations in Russia: An automated content analysis
Russia's intervention in the Georgian–South Ossetian conflict has highlighted the need to rigorously examine trends in the public debate over the use of force in Russia. Approaching this debate through the prism of civil–military relations, we take advantage of recent methodological advances in automated content analysis and generate a new dataset of 8000 public statements made by Russia's political and military leaders during the Putin period. T…
Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts
Politics and political conflict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have hindered their use in political science research. Here lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many i…
Choosing Your Neighbors: Networks of Diffusion in International Relations1
In examining the diffusion of social and political phenomena like regime transition, conflict, and policy change, scholars routinely make choices about how proximity is defined and which neighbors should be considered more important than others. Since each specification offers an alternative view of the networks through which diffusion can take place, one's decision can exert a significant influence on the magnitude and scope of estimated diffusi…
When the Going Gets Tough: The “Why” of Goal Striving Matters
No prior research has examined how motivation for goal striving influences persistence in the face of increasing goal difficulty. This research examined the role of self‐reported (Study 1) and primed (Study 2) autonomous and controlled motives in predicting objectively assessed persistence during the pursuit of an increasingly difficult goal. In Study 1, 100 B ritish athletes (64 males; M age = 19.89 years, SD age = 2.43) pursued a goal of increa…
Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses
Collection and especially analysis of open‐ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it …
Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics
Recent advances in research tools for the systematic analysis of textual data are enabling exciting new research throughout the social sciences. For comparative politics, scholars who are often interested in non-English and possibly multilingual textual datasets, these advances may be difficult to access. This article discusses practical issues that arise in the processing, management, translation, and analysis of textual data with a particular f…
A Model of Text for Experimentation in the Social Sciences
Statistical models of text have become increasingly popular in statistics and computer science as a method of exploring large document collections. Social scientists often want to move beyond exploration, to measurement and experimentation, and make inference about social and political processes that drive discourse and content. In this article, we develop a model of text data that supports this type of substantive research. Our approach is to po…
Does Conflict Lead to Ethnic Particularism? Electoral Violence and Ethnicity in Kenya 2005–2008
What impact does violence have on ethnic identity? Do acts of violence tend to create greater segmentation and “hardening” of identities among ethnic groups? In this article, we empirically assess the claim that violence inevitably leads to the hardening of ethnic identity (which we operationalize as expressions of ethnic particularism over a national identity). Using survey data from Kenya covering the period 2005–2008, integrated with geocoded …
Political Mobilization and Government Targeting: When Do Dissidents Challenge the State
Activist groups face a number of strategic challenges when pursuing social change. Among the most important is selecting the appropriate target for protest activity. Yet, scholars have typically focused on dissident–government interactions, rather than the entire range of potential targets. Why, then, do dissidents choose to target the state rather than other social actors such as firms, rival ethnic groups, the press, and so on? We argue that di…
Holocaust History, Far-Right Parties, and Antisemitic Incidents
Ethnic Minorities and Politics in Post-Socialist Southeastern Europe
Ethnic Minorities and Politics in Post-Socialist Southeastern Europe." Democracy and Security, 14(4), pp. 443–444
The Global Diffusion of Law: Transnational Crime and the Case of Human Trafficking
In the past few decades new laws criminalizing certain transnational activities have proliferated: from money laundering, corruption, and insider trading to trafficking in weapons and drugs. Human trafficking is one example. We argue that criminalization of trafficking in persons has diffused in large part because of the way the issue has been framed: primarily as a problem of organized crime rather than predominantly an egregious human rights ab…
Foreign threat and political party change: Russia and changes in party manifestos
How do political parties react to foreign security threats? There has been very little attention paid in the literature generally to how parties react to international events, particularly how parties react to foreign policy threats. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, we examine how political parties in countries in Europe have reacted to Russian actions in terms of their emphasis on security issues. Based upon our analysis of the…
STM: An R Package for Structural Topic Models
This paper demonstrates how to use the R package stm for structural topic modeling. The structural topic model allows researchers to flexibly estimate a topic model that includes document-level metadata. Estimation is accomplished through a fast variational approximation. The stm package provides many useful features, including rich ways to explore topics, estimate uncertainty, and visualize quantities of interest.
Ethnic Party Candidate Performance in Local Elections: Evidence from Romania and Slovakia
This article assesses the effects of candidate gender, incumbency, and local ethnic composition on the electoral performance of ethnic party candidates in mayoral elections in Romania and Slovakia. The results of my statistical analysis indicate that candidate gender has a minimal effect on electoral performance, whereas incumbency and local ethnic composition have a large and statistically significant effect. My findings also suggest that more e…
Secessionism and Terrorism: Bombs, Blood, and Independence in Europe and Eurasia
Secessionism and Terrorism: Bombs, Blood, and Independence in Europe and Eurasia." Terrorism and Political Violence, 31(4), pp. 906–907
Structural Inequality and Ethnic Bloc Voting
Objective A large body of ethnic politics literature suggests that horizontal inequalities exacerbate ethnic conflict. However, the relationship between intergroup inequality and ethnic bloc voting behavior has escaped empirical analysis. We test the relationship between ethnic bloc voting and horizontal inequality by examining how relative disparity affects individuals’ probability of supporting the same political party as other co‐ethnics. Meth…
What Makes Foreign Policy Teams Tick: Explaining Variation in Group Performance at Geopolitical Forecasting
When do groups—be they countries, administrations, or other organizations—more or less accurately understand the world around them and assess political choices? Some argue that group decision-making processes often fail due to biases induced by groupthink. Others argue that groups, by aggregating knowledge, are better at analyzing the foreign policy world. To advance knowledge about the intersection of politics and group decision making, this pap…
From adversaries to allies: Ethnic gerrymandering and ethnic party behaviour in local elections in Macedonia
Constitutional designers often construct political institutions to provide greater autonomy to ethnic minority groups. One tool available to constitutional designers is ‘ethnic gerrymandering’, where the boundaries of local government units are altered to provide greater representation to minority groups. This paper analyses the effects of changes in the ethnic composition of municipalities, which occur as a result of ethnic gerrymandering, on et…
Wrestling with Complexity in Computational Social Science: Theory, Estimation and Representation
What Do We Know about Ethnic Outbidding? We Need to Take Ideology Seriously
The term “ethnic outbidding” refers to an auction-like process where ethnically-based political parties adopt extreme ideological positions as a means of distancing themselves from rival parties. While a lot of research references ethnic outbidding, very little empirical analysis actually assesses the ability of the outbidding model to explain the actions of ethnic political parties. More generally, existing research on outbidding fails to accoun…
Adjusting for Confounding with Text Matching
We identify situations in which conditioning on text can address confounding in observational studies. We argue that a matching approach is particularly well‐suited to this task, but existing matching methods are ill‐equipped to handle high‐dimensional text data. Our proposed solution is to estimate a low‐dimensional summary of the text and condition on this summary via matching. We propose a method of text matching, topical inverse regression ma…
Turning discontent into votes: Economic inequality and ethnic outbidding
Ethnic outbidding, where parties adopt ever more extreme positions to capture electoral advantage, has become an increasingly common practice among ethnic parties. As economic issues have often served as a catalyst for ethnic tension, increasing levels of economic inequality should lead parties to adopt more extreme positions in an attempt to outbid one another. Furthermore, as their economic and ethnic platforms will appeal to the same ethnicall…
Political science (24 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Computational and Text Analysis Methods (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Ethnic group (10 works)