Soren Jordan
Biographic Data
| ID | 4122684 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Soren Jordan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Soren |
| FAMILY NAME | Jordan |
| SIGNATURE | JORDAN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Auburn University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4201-1085 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Election Fraud in the American Mind
Objective Disputes over election fraud have become a defining feature of contemporary American politics, yet it remains unclear whether partisans are disagreeing about the same underlying phenomenon. This article examines how Americans understand and interpret the phrase “election fraud” and whether partisan divisions reflect differences in concern about fraud or differences in what the term itself is taken to mean. Methods We use novel survey qu…
The Racial Typification of Election Officials and Trust in Elections
Who do Americans think runs their elections? This paper examines the racial typification of election officials, that is, how Americans perceive the racial composition of the people who administer elections and what drives those perceptions. Using survey data from a module in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study paired with county-level demographic data, we model perceptions of election official racial composition as a compositional dependent varia…
Does “Precocious Research Creativity” Account for Notable Late-Career Research Achievements by Political Scientists
This article offers the first test with valid measures and rigorous multivariate methods of the hypothesis that significant early-career research achievements of academics predict late-career achievements of the same type. Considerable research investigated the correlates of late-career research success; however, this promising hypothesis that originated in psychological and educational research on adolescents has not been tested systematically f…
Conditional relationships in dynamic models
Many political science theories posit empirical relationships that are conditioned by some moderating variable, which scholars model using a multiplicative interaction term in a regression. In recent years, scholars have begun using such terms in dynamic regression models with time series data. However, the lack of guidance on adding multiplicative interactions to these workhorse models exposes problems with the consistency of the estimator, mode…
Reevaluating ideological asymmetries in specific support for the Supreme Court
Recent studies show the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center undermined multiple forms of support for the Supreme Court. These findings are in tension with existing work on the ideological structure of specific support of the Supreme Court, which finds more tolerance for ideological disagreement among liberals than among conservatives. In this note, we replicate and extend Haglin et al. (2021), whose analysis ends in…
The Necessity of Moving Averages in Dynamic Linear Regression Models
Consensus from the debate over lagged dependent variables in dynamic linear regression models advises that including enough lags of the dependent and independent variables will fully model autocorrelation in the error term. But this approach fails to account for a long‐neglected source of autocorrelation in the error term—moving averages—which cannot be represented with a finite number of lags. Approximating moving averages results in either inco…
Taking Variance Seriously
Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) and generalized ARCH (GARCH) models allow users to estimate the conditional mean and conditional error variance of a time series process. Although simulation methods exist to disaggregate the short- and long-run effects of covariate shocks to the conditional mean, scholars’ inferences about the conditional error variance are currently limited to tabular interpretation. We propose a novel method…
Restoring Trust in US Elections through Effective Election Administrator Messaging
During the 2020 election cycle, numerous national, state, and local organizations mounted campaigns designed to counter mis- and disinformation about election activities and to foster public trust in election processes. Local and state election offices focused intently on creating and disseminating accurate messages about when, where, and how to vote. Despite these efforts, trust in the 2020 election remained confoundingly low. This research anal…
The Personality and Politics of Cryptocurrency Investors
Investing in cryptocurrency has become more popular among Americans. Despite this, politicians and social scientists know almost nothing about the politics of cryptocurrency in the American public. By analyzing an original, nationally representative survey of 2500 American respondents, we create the first robust profile of the personalities, demographics, and political attitudes of cryptocurrency owners. We show that Americans who report hardship…
They’re Coming for You! How Perceptions of Automation Affect Public Support for Universal Basic Income
Media stories on the economy tout automation as one of the biggest contemporary technological changes in America and argue that many Americans may lose their jobs because of it. Politicians and financial elites often promote a policy of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to the potential unemployment caused by automation, suggesting Americans should support UBI to protect them from this technological disruption. This linkage and basic des…
How to Cautiously Uncover the “Black Box” of Machine Learning Models for Legislative Scholars
Machine learning models, especially ensemble and tree‐based approaches, offer great promise to legislative scholars. However, they are heavily underutilized outside of narrow applications to text and networks. We believe this is because they are difficult to interpret: while the models are extremely flexible, they have been criticized as “black box” techniques due to their difficulty in visualizing the effect of predictors on the outcome of inter…
Improving the Interpretation of Random Effects Regression Results
Mummolo and Peterson improve the use and interpretation of fixed-effects models by pointing out that unit intercepts fundamentally reduce the amount of variation of variables in fixed-effects models. Along a similar vein, we make two claims in the context of random effects models. First, we show that potentially large reductions in variation, in this case caused by quasi-demeaning, also occur in models using random effects. Second, in many instan…
Avoiding, and Learning From, Mistakes Made by Junior Scholars Teaching Political Methodology
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Measuring and framing support for universal basic income
We execute an original survey experiment to examine the extent and determinants of support for a nascent policy issue, universal basic income (UBI), in the American public. We explore the effects of how UBI is framed (either in the context of values or the context of policy), finding three key results. First, UBI is primarily a Democratic and liberal policy. Second, negative arguments against UBI move support for UBI more than positive arguments.…
Signaling restraint
Approximately 20% of contemporary rebel groups have expressed commitment to international law and signaled their intention to exercise restraint during wartime. Which rebel groups make these commitments and under what conditions? We argue that international engagement shapes the likelihood of rebel commitment to international law. Rebel groups with transnational non-military support and clear organizational structure are likely to speak the langu…
Ideology and Specific Support for the Supreme Court
We develop and assess an account of ideological asymmetries in public support for the Supreme Court. We find that specific support for the Supreme Court is more strongly negatively related to perceptions that the Court is overly liberal than perceptions that the Court is overly conservative. Our findings provide a more complete theoretical account of dynamics in specific support for the Supreme Court and indicate a mechanism behind the recent dec…
Leadership political action committee donations and party status
A recent study by Aldrich, Ballard, Lerner, and Rohde (2017) examines whether a specific type of money—donations from leadership political action committees—is systematically related to party goals outside of policy influence. Their model is theoretically incomplete, as leadership political action committees donate considerable money to candidates who do not help the party win new seats or maintain ideological cohesion. I account for this behavio…
Cointegration Testing and Dynamic Simulations of Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models
In this article, we introduce dynamac, a suite of commands designed to assist users in modeling and visualizing the effects of autoregressive distributed lag models and in testing for cointegration. We discuss the bounds cointegration test proposed by Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (2001, Journal of Applied Econometrics 16: 289–326), which we have adapted into a command. Because the resulting models can be dynamically complex, we follow the advice of P…
Response to Sam Rosenfeld’s review of Party Polarization in America
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Presidents and Polarization of the American Electorate
Scholars widely understand that the U.S. electorate has become increasingly polarized since the 1980s. However, little rigorous statistical work evaluates the role of the American president in this process. A potential reason for the lack of rigorous statistical work could be measurement limitations. Previous work has also not separated out how presidents affect fellow and opposing partisans in the ongoing process. New measures of electoral polar…
Courts and Issue Attention in Canada
Objective To inform international discourse about judicial countermajoritarianism, we assess whether decisions enhancing gay rights by Canadian courts increase the media's attention to homosexuality and related topics. Method We first collect a data set of monthly counts of relevant articles published in two prominent Canadian newspapers and then estimate Markov‐switching models to evaluate whether increases in media attention to homosexuality ar…
Extremism in survey measures of ideology
Research on mass political behavior relies extensively on ideology scales. The majority of political science surveys use a unique, and potentially problematic, word to anchor the endpoints of these scales (“extremely”). However, political science has surprisingly little evidence on the effects of using this anchor over others. We utilize an older, but ignored, survey experiment on the 1989 American National Election Study (ANES) Pilot Study to an…
The President, Polarization and the Party Platforms, 1944–2012
Scholars generally agree that political elites in the US are polarized. Yet most of our evidence, especially longitudinal evidence, is built on proxy measures of elite ideology that fail to identify the unique dimensions that drive the cleavages between the parties. And our understanding of when elite polarization reemerged is also unclear. This study leverages the party platforms, along with the tools of content analysis, to shed new light on el…
Ideology and Specific Support for the Supreme Court
We develop and assess an account of ideological asymmetries in public support for the Supreme Court. We find that specific support for the Supreme Court is more strongly negatively related to perceptions that the Court is overly liberal than perceptions that the Court is overly conservative. Our findings provide a more complete theoretical account of dynamics in specific support for the Supreme Court and indicate a mechanism behind the recent dec…
Measuring and framing support for universal basic income
We execute an original survey experiment to examine the extent and determinants of support for a nascent policy issue, universal basic income (UBI), in the American public. We explore the effects of how UBI is framed (either in the context of values or the context of policy), finding three key results. First, UBI is primarily a Democratic and liberal policy. Second, negative arguments against UBI move support for UBI more than positive arguments.…
Improving the Interpretation of Random Effects Regression Results
Mummolo and Peterson improve the use and interpretation of fixed-effects models by pointing out that unit intercepts fundamentally reduce the amount of variation of variables in fixed-effects models. Along a similar vein, we make two claims in the context of random effects models. First, we show that potentially large reductions in variation, in this case caused by quasi-demeaning, also occur in models using random effects. Second, in many instan…
Signaling restraint
Approximately 20% of contemporary rebel groups have expressed commitment to international law and signaled their intention to exercise restraint during wartime. Which rebel groups make these commitments and under what conditions? We argue that international engagement shapes the likelihood of rebel commitment to international law. Rebel groups with transnational non-military support and clear organizational structure are likely to speak the langu…
Restoring Trust in US Elections through Effective Election Administrator Messaging
During the 2020 election cycle, numerous national, state, and local organizations mounted campaigns designed to counter mis- and disinformation about election activities and to foster public trust in election processes. Local and state election offices focused intently on creating and disseminating accurate messages about when, where, and how to vote. Despite these efforts, trust in the 2020 election remained confoundingly low. This research anal…
The President, Polarization and the Party Platforms, 1944–2012
Scholars generally agree that political elites in the US are polarized. Yet most of our evidence, especially longitudinal evidence, is built on proxy measures of elite ideology that fail to identify the unique dimensions that drive the cleavages between the parties. And our understanding of when elite polarization reemerged is also unclear. This study leverages the party platforms, along with the tools of content analysis, to shed new light on el…
They’re Coming for You! How Perceptions of Automation Affect Public Support for Universal Basic Income
Media stories on the economy tout automation as one of the biggest contemporary technological changes in America and argue that many Americans may lose their jobs because of it. Politicians and financial elites often promote a policy of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to the potential unemployment caused by automation, suggesting Americans should support UBI to protect them from this technological disruption. This linkage and basic des…
How to Cautiously Uncover the “Black Box” of Machine Learning Models for Legislative Scholars
Machine learning models, especially ensemble and tree‐based approaches, offer great promise to legislative scholars. However, they are heavily underutilized outside of narrow applications to text and networks. We believe this is because they are difficult to interpret: while the models are extremely flexible, they have been criticized as “black box” techniques due to their difficulty in visualizing the effect of predictors on the outcome of inter…
Extremism in survey measures of ideology
Research on mass political behavior relies extensively on ideology scales. The majority of political science surveys use a unique, and potentially problematic, word to anchor the endpoints of these scales (“extremely”). However, political science has surprisingly little evidence on the effects of using this anchor over others. We utilize an older, but ignored, survey experiment on the 1989 American National Election Study (ANES) Pilot Study to an…
The Necessity of Moving Averages in Dynamic Linear Regression Models
Consensus from the debate over lagged dependent variables in dynamic linear regression models advises that including enough lags of the dependent and independent variables will fully model autocorrelation in the error term. But this approach fails to account for a long‐neglected source of autocorrelation in the error term—moving averages—which cannot be represented with a finite number of lags. Approximating moving averages results in either inco…
The President, Polarization and the Party Platforms, 1944–2012
Scholars generally agree that political elites in the US are polarized. Yet most of our evidence, especially longitudinal evidence, is built on proxy measures of elite ideology that fail to identify the unique dimensions that drive the cleavages between the parties. And our understanding of when elite polarization reemerged is also unclear. This study leverages the party platforms, along with the tools of content analysis, to shed new light on el…
Extremism in survey measures of ideology
Research on mass political behavior relies extensively on ideology scales. The majority of political science surveys use a unique, and potentially problematic, word to anchor the endpoints of these scales (“extremely”). However, political science has surprisingly little evidence on the effects of using this anchor over others. We utilize an older, but ignored, survey experiment on the 1989 American National Election Study (ANES) Pilot Study to an…
Cointegration Testing and Dynamic Simulations of Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models
In this article, we introduce dynamac, a suite of commands designed to assist users in modeling and visualizing the effects of autoregressive distributed lag models and in testing for cointegration. We discuss the bounds cointegration test proposed by Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (2001, Journal of Applied Econometrics 16: 289–326), which we have adapted into a command. Because the resulting models can be dynamically complex, we follow the advice of P…
Response to Sam Rosenfeld’s review of Party Polarization in America
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Presidents and Polarization of the American Electorate
Scholars widely understand that the U.S. electorate has become increasingly polarized since the 1980s. However, little rigorous statistical work evaluates the role of the American president in this process. A potential reason for the lack of rigorous statistical work could be measurement limitations. Previous work has also not separated out how presidents affect fellow and opposing partisans in the ongoing process. New measures of electoral polar…
Courts and Issue Attention in Canada
Objective To inform international discourse about judicial countermajoritarianism, we assess whether decisions enhancing gay rights by Canadian courts increase the media's attention to homosexuality and related topics. Method We first collect a data set of monthly counts of relevant articles published in two prominent Canadian newspapers and then estimate Markov‐switching models to evaluate whether increases in media attention to homosexuality ar…
Leadership political action committee donations and party status
A recent study by Aldrich, Ballard, Lerner, and Rohde (2017) examines whether a specific type of money—donations from leadership political action committees—is systematically related to party goals outside of policy influence. Their model is theoretically incomplete, as leadership political action committees donate considerable money to candidates who do not help the party win new seats or maintain ideological cohesion. I account for this behavio…
Signaling restraint
Approximately 20% of contemporary rebel groups have expressed commitment to international law and signaled their intention to exercise restraint during wartime. Which rebel groups make these commitments and under what conditions? We argue that international engagement shapes the likelihood of rebel commitment to international law. Rebel groups with transnational non-military support and clear organizational structure are likely to speak the langu…
Ideology and Specific Support for the Supreme Court
We develop and assess an account of ideological asymmetries in public support for the Supreme Court. We find that specific support for the Supreme Court is more strongly negatively related to perceptions that the Court is overly liberal than perceptions that the Court is overly conservative. Our findings provide a more complete theoretical account of dynamics in specific support for the Supreme Court and indicate a mechanism behind the recent dec…
Avoiding, and Learning From, Mistakes Made by Junior Scholars Teaching Political Methodology
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Measuring and framing support for universal basic income
We execute an original survey experiment to examine the extent and determinants of support for a nascent policy issue, universal basic income (UBI), in the American public. We explore the effects of how UBI is framed (either in the context of values or the context of policy), finding three key results. First, UBI is primarily a Democratic and liberal policy. Second, negative arguments against UBI move support for UBI more than positive arguments.…
They’re Coming for You! How Perceptions of Automation Affect Public Support for Universal Basic Income
Media stories on the economy tout automation as one of the biggest contemporary technological changes in America and argue that many Americans may lose their jobs because of it. Politicians and financial elites often promote a policy of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to the potential unemployment caused by automation, suggesting Americans should support UBI to protect them from this technological disruption. This linkage and basic des…
How to Cautiously Uncover the “Black Box” of Machine Learning Models for Legislative Scholars
Machine learning models, especially ensemble and tree‐based approaches, offer great promise to legislative scholars. However, they are heavily underutilized outside of narrow applications to text and networks. We believe this is because they are difficult to interpret: while the models are extremely flexible, they have been criticized as “black box” techniques due to their difficulty in visualizing the effect of predictors on the outcome of inter…
Improving the Interpretation of Random Effects Regression Results
Mummolo and Peterson improve the use and interpretation of fixed-effects models by pointing out that unit intercepts fundamentally reduce the amount of variation of variables in fixed-effects models. Along a similar vein, we make two claims in the context of random effects models. First, we show that potentially large reductions in variation, in this case caused by quasi-demeaning, also occur in models using random effects. Second, in many instan…
Taking Variance Seriously
Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) and generalized ARCH (GARCH) models allow users to estimate the conditional mean and conditional error variance of a time series process. Although simulation methods exist to disaggregate the short- and long-run effects of covariate shocks to the conditional mean, scholars’ inferences about the conditional error variance are currently limited to tabular interpretation. We propose a novel method…
Restoring Trust in US Elections through Effective Election Administrator Messaging
During the 2020 election cycle, numerous national, state, and local organizations mounted campaigns designed to counter mis- and disinformation about election activities and to foster public trust in election processes. Local and state election offices focused intently on creating and disseminating accurate messages about when, where, and how to vote. Despite these efforts, trust in the 2020 election remained confoundingly low. This research anal…
The Personality and Politics of Cryptocurrency Investors
Investing in cryptocurrency has become more popular among Americans. Despite this, politicians and social scientists know almost nothing about the politics of cryptocurrency in the American public. By analyzing an original, nationally representative survey of 2500 American respondents, we create the first robust profile of the personalities, demographics, and political attitudes of cryptocurrency owners. We show that Americans who report hardship…
Reevaluating ideological asymmetries in specific support for the Supreme Court
Recent studies show the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center undermined multiple forms of support for the Supreme Court. These findings are in tension with existing work on the ideological structure of specific support of the Supreme Court, which finds more tolerance for ideological disagreement among liberals than among conservatives. In this note, we replicate and extend Haglin et al. (2021), whose analysis ends in…
The Necessity of Moving Averages in Dynamic Linear Regression Models
Consensus from the debate over lagged dependent variables in dynamic linear regression models advises that including enough lags of the dependent and independent variables will fully model autocorrelation in the error term. But this approach fails to account for a long‐neglected source of autocorrelation in the error term—moving averages—which cannot be represented with a finite number of lags. Approximating moving averages results in either inco…
Election Fraud in the American Mind
Objective Disputes over election fraud have become a defining feature of contemporary American politics, yet it remains unclear whether partisans are disagreeing about the same underlying phenomenon. This article examines how Americans understand and interpret the phrase “election fraud” and whether partisan divisions reflect differences in concern about fraud or differences in what the term itself is taken to mean. Methods We use novel survey qu…
The Racial Typification of Election Officials and Trust in Elections
Who do Americans think runs their elections? This paper examines the racial typification of election officials, that is, how Americans perceive the racial composition of the people who administer elections and what drives those perceptions. Using survey data from a module in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study paired with county-level demographic data, we model perceptions of election official racial composition as a compositional dependent varia…
Does “Precocious Research Creativity” Account for Notable Late-Career Research Achievements by Political Scientists
This article offers the first test with valid measures and rigorous multivariate methods of the hypothesis that significant early-career research achievements of academics predict late-career achievements of the same type. Considerable research investigated the correlates of late-career research success; however, this promising hypothesis that originated in psychological and educational research on adolescents has not been tested systematically f…
Conditional relationships in dynamic models
Many political science theories posit empirical relationships that are conditioned by some moderating variable, which scholars model using a multiplicative interaction term in a regression. In recent years, scholars have begun using such terms in dynamic regression models with time series data. However, the lack of guidance on adding multiplicative interactions to these workhorse models exposes problems with the consistency of the estimator, mode…
Political science (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Ideology (5 works)