Alexander Herzog
Biographic Data
| ID | 4378307 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Herzog |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander |
| FAMILY NAME | Herzog |
| SIGNATURE | HERZOG A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Clemson University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
From foe to friend? Government–opposition conflict and the appointment of cabinet ministers
This paper introduces a dynamic theory of ministerial appointments in coalition governments, arguing that party leaders reward members of parliament (MPs) who fulfilled their expected roles in the prior government–opposition conflict. Using all speeches from the German Bundestag of six decades (1961–2021), we estimate MPs’ expressed positions on the government–opposition conflict dimension and assess their effect on cabinet selection. Contrary to…
Transfer learning for topic labeling: Analysis of the UK House of Commons speeches 1935–2014
Topic models are widely used in natural language processing, allowing researchers to estimate the underlying themes in a collection of documents. Most topic models require the additional step of attaching meaningful labels to estimated topics, a process that is not scalable, suffers from human bias, and is difficult to replicate. We present a transfer topic labeling method that seeks to remedy these problems, using domain-specific codebooks as th…
Intra-cabinet politics and fiscal governance in times of austerity
In the context of recent economic and financial crisis in Europe, questions about the power of the core executive to control fiscal outcomes are more important than ever. Why are some governments more effective in controlling spending while others fall prey to excessive overspending by individual cabinet ministers? We approach this question by lifting the veil of collective cabinet responsibility and focusing on intra-cabinet decision-making arou…
Signals to Their Parliaments? Governments’ Use of Votes and Policy Statements in the EU Council
Does parliamentary oversight of governments’ decisions in the international arena matter? This article finds that it does: governments with strong parliamentary oversight behave differently when negotiating policies at the EU level compared with governments with less powerful parliaments. Where parliaments have formal powers to oversee and restrict their government's positions we see a significantly higher use of opposing votes and formal policy …
Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech
Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text data perform poorly except when applied to narrowly selected texts discussing the same issues and written in the same style. We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Ir…
The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent during Economic Crisis
Economic crisis and the resulting need for austerity budgets have divided many governing parties and coalitions in Europe despite strong party discipline in the legislative voting on these harsh budgets. We measure these divisions using automated text analysis methods to scale the positions that legislators express in budget debates in an effort to avoid punishment by voters for supporting austerity measures while still adhering to strict party d…
The dynamics of support: The winners–losers gap in attitudes toward EU membership in post-communist countries
We examine the question of whether economic winners were more likely to support European Union (EU) membership than economic losers in post-communist countries. We include in our analysis every cross-national survey of post-communist countries with both a measure of individual attitudes toward EU membership as well as an appropriate measure of individual self-assessment of economic progress. The resultant data set contains data from 67 different …
Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech
Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text data perform poorly except when applied to narrowly selected texts discussing the same issues and written in the same style. We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Ir…
The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent during Economic Crisis
Economic crisis and the resulting need for austerity budgets have divided many governing parties and coalitions in Europe despite strong party discipline in the legislative voting on these harsh budgets. We measure these divisions using automated text analysis methods to scale the positions that legislators express in budget debates in an effort to avoid punishment by voters for supporting austerity measures while still adhering to strict party d…
The dynamics of support: The winners–losers gap in attitudes toward EU membership in post-communist countries
We examine the question of whether economic winners were more likely to support European Union (EU) membership than economic losers in post-communist countries. We include in our analysis every cross-national survey of post-communist countries with both a measure of individual attitudes toward EU membership as well as an appropriate measure of individual self-assessment of economic progress. The resultant data set contains data from 67 different …
Signals to Their Parliaments? Governments’ Use of Votes and Policy Statements in the EU Council
Does parliamentary oversight of governments’ decisions in the international arena matter? This article finds that it does: governments with strong parliamentary oversight behave differently when negotiating policies at the EU level compared with governments with less powerful parliaments. Where parliaments have formal powers to oversee and restrict their government's positions we see a significantly higher use of opposing votes and formal policy …
Intra-cabinet politics and fiscal governance in times of austerity
In the context of recent economic and financial crisis in Europe, questions about the power of the core executive to control fiscal outcomes are more important than ever. Why are some governments more effective in controlling spending while others fall prey to excessive overspending by individual cabinet ministers? We approach this question by lifting the veil of collective cabinet responsibility and focusing on intra-cabinet decision-making arou…
The dynamics of support: The winners–losers gap in attitudes toward EU membership in post-communist countries
We examine the question of whether economic winners were more likely to support European Union (EU) membership than economic losers in post-communist countries. We include in our analysis every cross-national survey of post-communist countries with both a measure of individual attitudes toward EU membership as well as an appropriate measure of individual self-assessment of economic progress. The resultant data set contains data from 67 different …
The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent during Economic Crisis
Economic crisis and the resulting need for austerity budgets have divided many governing parties and coalitions in Europe despite strong party discipline in the legislative voting on these harsh budgets. We measure these divisions using automated text analysis methods to scale the positions that legislators express in budget debates in an effort to avoid punishment by voters for supporting austerity measures while still adhering to strict party d…
Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech
Existing approaches to measuring political disagreement from text data perform poorly except when applied to narrowly selected texts discussing the same issues and written in the same style. We demonstrate the first viable approach for estimating legislator-specific scores from the entire speech corpus of a legislature, while also producing extensive information about the evolution of speech polarization and politically loaded language. In the Ir…
Signals to Their Parliaments? Governments’ Use of Votes and Policy Statements in the EU Council
Does parliamentary oversight of governments’ decisions in the international arena matter? This article finds that it does: governments with strong parliamentary oversight behave differently when negotiating policies at the EU level compared with governments with less powerful parliaments. Where parliaments have formal powers to oversee and restrict their government's positions we see a significantly higher use of opposing votes and formal policy …
Intra-cabinet politics and fiscal governance in times of austerity
In the context of recent economic and financial crisis in Europe, questions about the power of the core executive to control fiscal outcomes are more important than ever. Why are some governments more effective in controlling spending while others fall prey to excessive overspending by individual cabinet ministers? We approach this question by lifting the veil of collective cabinet responsibility and focusing on intra-cabinet decision-making arou…
Transfer learning for topic labeling: Analysis of the UK House of Commons speeches 1935–2014
Topic models are widely used in natural language processing, allowing researchers to estimate the underlying themes in a collection of documents. Most topic models require the additional step of attaching meaningful labels to estimated topics, a process that is not scalable, suffers from human bias, and is difficult to replicate. We present a transfer topic labeling method that seeks to remedy these problems, using domain-specific codebooks as th…
From foe to friend? Government–opposition conflict and the appointment of cabinet ministers
This paper introduces a dynamic theory of ministerial appointments in coalition governments, arguing that party leaders reward members of parliament (MPs) who fulfilled their expected roles in the prior government–opposition conflict. Using all speeches from the German Bundestag of six decades (1961–2021), we estimate MPs’ expressed positions on the government–opposition conflict dimension and assess their effect on cabinet selection. Contrary to…
Electoral Systems and Political Participation (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Economics (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Legislature (3 works) · Opposition (politics (3 works) · Political economy (3 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (3 works)