Publications
2026. “Using Large Language Models to Analyze Political Texts Through Natural Language Understanding.” American Journal of Political Science 70(4): 1589–1605 (with Scott De Marchi, Conor Laver, Michael Laver, and Jinshuai Ma).
Large language models (LLMs) offer scalable alternatives to human experts when analyzing political texts for meaning , using natural language understanding (NLU). Qualitative NLU methods relying on human experts are severely limited by cost and scalability. Statistical text‐as‐data methods are scalable but rely on strong and often unrealistic assumptions. We propose a systematic, scalable, and replicable method that can extend existing qualitative and quantitative approaches by using LLMs to interpret texts meaningfully rather than as mere data. Our ensemble means of LLM‐generated estimates of party positions on six key issue dimensions correlate highly with equivalent mean ratings by country specialists. When applied to coalition policy declarations, LLM estimates align more closely with standard models of government formation than hand‐coded estimates. We conclude with a discussion of the profound implications of modern LLMs for political text analysis.
2026. “Measuring issue salience for political parties using LLMs.” West European Politics (with Michael Laver).
Understanding both party positions on issues and the relative importance, or salience, they attach to these is central to the study of party competition. Recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) can estimate issue positions from manifestos. This article asks whether LLMs can capture issue salience. Building on work by Benoit et al., it adapts LLM-based methods to measure relative issue salience in a multilingual corpus of manifestos. Alternative strategies are tested – including unconstrained scoring, ranking, saliency budgets, and pairwise comparisons – assessing output validity against benchmark expert surveys, human-labelling of manifestos. LLMs produce meaningful estimates of relative issue salience, though with lower correspondence to expert judgements than for issue positions. This highlights the promise of LLMs, the need for careful thinking about concepts of issue importance and salience, and about whether ‘strategic’ party manifestos are the best source of information about the ‘true’ importance for parties of particular issues.
2025. “Forging The Future: How AI is rewriting the rules of knowledge, expertise, and practice.” Asian Management Insights 12(2): 12–19.
1. AI is reshaping how humans create knowledge and learn. While it can accelerate understanding, bypassing the need to internalise facts could result in the erosion of critical thinking, originality, and deep engagement. 2. Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot create output beyond the data on which they are trained. Effective use of AI depends on asking the right questions based on contextual awareness, ethical judgement, and intellectual curiosity. 3. Universities should redesign curricula for thoughtful AI use and reshape assessments to value dimensions that resist automation – originality, justification, and interpretation.
2024. “AI and Data Science for Public Policy.” LSE Public Policy Review 3(3): 1–6.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and data science are reshaping public policy by enabling more data-driven, predictive, and responsive governance, while at the same time producing profound changes in knowledge production and education in the social and policy sciences. These advancements come with ethical and epistemological challenges surrounding issues of bias, transparency, privacy, and accountability. This special issue explores the opportunities and risks of integrating AI into public policy, offering theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses to help policymakers navigate these complexities. The contributions explore how AI can enhance decision-making in areas such as healthcare, justice, and public services, while emphasising the need for fairness, human judgment, and democratic accountability. The issue provides a roadmap for harnessing AI’s potential responsibly, ensuring it serves the public good and upholds democratic values.
2022. “Scaling hand-coded political texts to learn more about left-right policy content.” Party Politics 28(5): 834–844 (with Thomas Däubler).
Manual annotation of the policy content of political texts forms the basis for one of the most widely used empirical measures in comparative politics: left-right policy positions. Bridging automated “text as data” approaches and qualitative content analysis, we apply statistical scaling to this data to learn more about the association of specific policy dimensions to the left-right super-dimension, in a way that minimizes ex ante assumptions about the substantive content of left-right policy. We apply a Bayesian negative binomial variant of Slapin and Proksch’s (2008) “wordfish” model to category counts from party manifestos coded by the Manifesto Project, providing a data-driven approach that offers new insights into the policy content of left and right. We demonstrate how this method also works with content not originally designed for measuring positions. In addition, we show how the approach can be extended to measure the policy content of two latent dimensions, with some categories contributing to both.
2021. “Textual Data Science with R.” The American Statistician 75(4): 453–454.
2020. “Text as Data: An Overview.” In Curini, Luigi and Robert Franzese, eds. Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations. Thousand Oaks: Sage. pp. 461–497.
2019. “Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication Through Textual Complexity.” American Journal of Political Science 63(2): 491–508 (with Kevin Munger and Arthur Spirling).
Political scientists lack domain‐specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books data set. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.
2019. “Dumbing Down? Trends in the Complexity of Political Communication.” In Frances Lee and Nolan McCarty, eds., Can America Govern Itself? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 220–236 (with Kevin Munger and Arthur Spirling).
2018. “quanteda: An R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data.” Journal of Open Source Software 3(30): 774 (with Kohei Watanabe, Haiyan Wang, Paul Nulty, Adam Obeng, Stefan Müller, and Akitaka Matsuo).
2018. “Fast, Consistent Tokenization of Natural Language Text.” Journal of Open Source Software 3(23): 655 (with Lincoln A. Mullen, Os Keyes, Dmitry Selivanov, and Jeffrey Arnold).
2017. “Predicting the Brexit Vote by Tracking and Classifying Public Opinion Using Twitter Data.” Statistics, Politics and Policy 8(1): 85–104 (with Julio Amador, Sofia Collignon-Delmar, and Akitaka Matsuo).
We use 23M Tweets related to the EU referendum in the UK to predict the Brexit vote. In particular, we use user-generated labels known as hashtags to build training sets related to the Leave/Remain campaign. Next, we train SVMs in order to classify Tweets. Finally, we compare our results to Internet and telephone polls. This approach not only allows to reduce the time of hand-coding data to create a training set, but also achieves high level of correlations with Internet polls. Our results suggest that Twitter data may be a suitable substitute for Internet polls and may be a useful complement for telephone polls. We also discuss the reach and limitations of this method.
2017. “Text analysis in R.” Communication Methods and Measures 11(4): 245–265 (with Kasper Welbers and Wouter van Atteveldt).
Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In this teacher’s corner, we address these barriers by providing an overview of general steps and operations in a computational text analysis project, and demonstrate how each step can be performed using the R statistical software. As a popular open-source platform, R has an extensive user community that develops and maintains a wide range of text analysis packages. We show that these packages make it easy to perform advanced text analytics.
2017. “Estimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Votes.” Political Science Research and Methods 5(2): 379–396 (with Daniel Schwarz and Denise Traber).
Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for estimating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on estimating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes and strong party discipline, which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indication of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, as party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the party line. Yet, the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain essentially unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich feature of the Swiss legislature: on most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times. Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models, we further explain the differences between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level preferences for energy policy.
2017. “Text Analysis: Estimating Policy Preferences From Written and Spoken Words.” In Jennifer Bachner, Kathryn Wagner Hill, and Benjamin Ginsberg, eds., Analytics, Policy and Governance. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 137–159 (with Alexander Herzog).
2017. “Scaling Text with the Class Affinity Model.” London School of Economics and New York University manuscript (with Patrick Perry).
2016. “Crowd-Sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data.” American Political Science Review 110(2): 278–295 (with Drew Conway, Benjamin E. Lauderdale, Michael Laver, and Slava Mikhaylov).
Empirical social science often relies on data that are not observed in the field, but are transformed into quantitative variables by expert researchers who analyze and interpret qualitative raw sources. While generally considered the most valid way to produce data, this expert-driven process is inherently difficult to replicate or to assess on grounds of reliability. Using crowd-sourcing to distribute text for reading and interpretation by massive numbers of nonexperts, we generate results comparable to those using experts to read and interpret the same texts, but do so far more quickly and flexibly. Crucially, the data we collect can be reproduced and extended transparently, making crowd-sourced datasets intrinsically reproducible. This focuses researchers’ attention on the fundamental scientific objective of specifying reliable and replicable methods for collecting the data needed, rather than on the content of any particular dataset. We also show that our approach works straightforwardly with different types of political text, written in different languages. While findings reported here concern text analysis, they have far-reaching implications for expert-generated data in the social sciences.
2016. “Social Media and Political Communication in the 2014 Elections to the European Parliament.” Electoral Studies 44: 429–444 (with Paul Nulty, Yannis Theocharis, Sebastian Adrian Popa, and Olivier Parnet).
2015. “The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent During Economic Crisis.” Journal of Politics 77(4): 1157–1175 (with Alexander Herzog).
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 discipline by voting along party lines. Our test case is Ireland, a country that has experienced periods of rapid economic growth as well as one deep financial and economic crisis. Tracking dissent from 1987 to 2013, we show that austerity measures undermine government cohesion as verbal opposition markedly increases in direct response to the economic pain felt in a legislator’s constituency. The economic vulnerability of a legislator’s constituency also directly explains position taking on austerity budgets among both government and opposition.
2015. “The Basic Arithmetic of Legislative Decisions.” American Journal of Political Science 59(2): 275–291 (with Michael Laver).
Despite the huge number of possible seat distributions following a general election in a multiparty parliamentary democracy, there are far fewer classes of seat distribution sharing important strategic features. We define an exclusive and exhaustive partition of the universe of theoretically possible n-party systems into five basic classes, the understanding of which facilitates more fruitful modeling of legislative politics, including government formation. Having defined a partition of legislative party systems and elaborated logical implications of this partition, we classify the population of postwar European legislatures. We show empirically that many of these are close to critical boundary conditions, so that stochastic processes involved in any legislative election could easily flip the resulting legislature from one type to another. This is of more than hypothetical interest, since we also show that important political outcomes differ systematically between the classes of party systems—outcomes that include duration of government formation negotiations, type of coalition cabinet that forms, and stability of the resulting government.
2013. “Validating Estimates of Latent Traits From Textual Data Using Human Judgment as a Benchmark.” Political Analysis 21: 298–313 (with Will Lowe).
Automated and statistical methods for estimating latent political traits and classes from textual data hold great promise, because virtually every political act involves the production of text. Statistical models of natural language features, however, are heavily laden with unrealistic assumptions about the process that generates these data, including the stochastic process of text generation, the functional link between political variables and observed text, and the nature of the variables (and dimensions) on which observed text should be conditioned. While acknowledging statistical models of latent traits to be “wrong,” political scientists nonetheless treat their results as sufficiently valid to be useful. In this article, we address the issue of substantive validity in the face of potential model failure, in the context of unsupervised scaling methods of latent traits. We critically examine one popular parametric measurement model of latent traits for text and then compare its results to systematic human judgments of the texts as a benchmark for validity.
2012. “Natural Sentences as Valid Units for Coded Political Texts.” British Journal of Political Science 42(4): 937–951 (with Thomas Däubler, Slava Mikhaylov, and Michael Laver).
2012. “How to scale coded text units without bias: A response to Gemenis.” Electoral Studies 31: 605–608 (with Michael Laver, Will Lowe, and Slava Mikhaylov).
Coding non-manifesto documents as if they were genuine policy platforms produced at election time clearly raises serious issues with error when these codings are used in the standard manner to estimate left-right policy positions. In addition to the long term solution of improving the document base of the Manifesto Project identified by Gemenis (2012), we argue that immediate gains in manifesto-based estimates of policy positions can be realised by using the confrontational logit scales from Lowe et al. (2011), which addresses the problems of scale content and scale construction that are exacerbated by but not unique to the problems found in proxy documents.
2012. “The Dimensionality Of Political Space: Epistemological And Methodological Considerations.” European Union Politics 13(2): 194–218 (with Michael Laver).
Spatial characterizations of agents’ preferences lie at the heart of many theories of political competition. These give rise to explicitly dimensional interpretations. Parties define and differentiate themselves in terms of substantive policy issues, and the configuration of such issues that is required for a good description of political competition affects how we think substantively about the underlying political space in which parties compete. For this reason a great deal of activity in political science consists of estimating such configurations in particular real settings. We focus on three main issues in this article. First, we discuss the nature of political differences and from this construct an interpretation of the dimensionality of the political space needed to describe a given real setting, underscoring the essentially metaphorical and instrumental use of this concept. Second, we contrast ex ante and ex post interpretations of this dimensionality. Third, we illustrate potential hazards arising from the purely inductive estimation of political spaces using a spatial example from the physical world and political competition in the European Parliament as a political example.
2012. “Policy Positioning in the European Parliament.” European Union Politics 13(1): 150–167 (with Gail McElroy).
Party politics in the European Parliament (EP) consists of competition between transnational party groups, each consisting of multiple national member parties from the 27 member states of the European Union (EU). Identifying the policy space that these parties inhabit and their ideological positions is both practically and conceptually challenging. In this article we characterize this policy competition by tracking EP political groups from three separate, original expert surveys taken in 2004, 2007 and 2010. We look at the relative positioning of the groups on multiple dimensions of policy, as well as changes in party group policy since 2004. Additionally, we characterize the policy cohesion of party groups by examining the relative positions of each group’s constituent parties, using independent national-level expert surveys. The results reinforce previous findings that EP party groups occupy the entire range of the left–right spectrum and, moreover, that their national party makeup consists of parties that are broadly cohesive in terms of their policy locations.
2012. “Coder Reliability and Misclassification in the Human Coding of Party Manifestos.” Political Analysis 20(1): 78–91 (with Slava Mikhaylov and Michael Laver).
The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) provides the only time series of estimated party policy positions in political science and has been extensively used in a wide variety of applications. Recent work (e.g., Benoit, Laver, and Mikhaylov 2009; Klingemann et al. 2006) focuses on nonsystematic sources of error in these estimates that arise from the text generation process. Our concern here, by contrast, is with error that arises during the text coding process since nearly all manifestos are coded only once by a single coder. First, we discuss reliability and misclassification in the context of hand-coded content analysis methods. Second, we report results of a coding experiment that used trained human coders to code sample manifestos provided by the CMP, allowing us to estimate the reliability of both coders and coding categories. Third, we compare our test codings to the published CMP “gold standard” codings of the test documents to assess accuracy and produce empirical estimates of a misclassification matrix for each coding category. Finally, we demonstrate the effect of coding misclassification on the CMP's most widely used index, its left-right scale. Our findings indicate that misclassification is a serious and systemic problem with the current CMP data set and coding process, suggesting the CMP scheme should be significantly simplified to address reliability issues.
2011. “Scaling Policy Preferences From Coded Political Texts.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 36(1): 123–155 (with William Lowe, Slava Mikhaylov, and Michael Laver).
Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left‐right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds‐ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more years, than has been possible before, and make this dataset publicly available. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the future design of coding schemes for political texts.
2011. “Critical Election 2010. The Realignment of the Hungarian Party System in the Left-Right Dimension.” [In Hungarian] In The New Formula: Elections in Hungary in 2010, eds. Zsolt Enyedi, Robert Tardos and Andrea Szabo. Budapest: DKMKA. pp. 17–42 (with Zsolt Enyedi).
2010. “Party Policy and Group Affiliation in the European Parliament.” British Journal of Political Science 40(2): 377–398 (with Gail McElroy).
Systematic empirical research has yet to explain how national parties join political groups in the European Parliament. This article first demonstrates, using original empirical measures from expert surveys of party positions, that EP party groups consist of national parties sharing similar policy positions. Secondly, using Bayesian/MCMC methods, the paper estimates the policy determinants of group affiliation using a (conditional) multinomial logit model to explain that ‘party group’ choice is largely driven by policy congruence. Finally, predictions from the model identify national parties not in their ‘ideally congruent’ EP groups. The findings suggest that the organization of and switching between EP groups is driven mainly by a concern to minimize policy incongruence between national and transnational levels.
2010. “Incumbent and Challenger Campaign Spending Effects in Proportional Electoral Systems: The Irish Elections of 2002.” Political Research Quarterly 63(1): 159–173 (with Michael Marsh).
Positive effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes have been found in several comparative, multiparty contexts, but very few of these systems use proportional representation. The few studies examining spending effects in multiparty elections have found that incumbent spending is no less effective than challenger spending, contrary to the vast bulk of empirical literature drawn from single-member district contexts. This study reexamines incumbent—challenger differences in spending effects under the single transferable vote. Examining the Irish general elections of 2002, the authors find a positive and statistically significant relationship between spending and votes. Candidates that spend more win more votes, and outspending one’s rivals means winning more of the vote share. Spending more also directly increases a candidate’s chance of winning a seat. Finally, incumbent spending is considerably less effective than spending by challengers from other parties but no less effective than spending by challengers from a candidate’s own party.
2009. “Irish Political Parties and Policy Stances on European Integration.” Irish Political Studies 24(4): 447–466.
Support for the political and economic integration of Europe has formed an increasingly important policy issue for Irish political parties as the European Union has grown in importance at both the domestic and European level. This article examines the political positioning of Irish parties on the issue of European integration, comparing these positions across parties and across time. For data, it draws on expert surveys taken at each election since 1992, a time series of coded manifestos as well as a computerized content analysis of the 2007 party manifestos. The article also reports the results of a previously unpublished expert survey of Irish party positions on other political dimensions conducted by the author in 2007.
2009. “Presidents, Parties And Policy Competition.” Journal of Politics 71(4): 1435–1447 (with Nina Wiesehomeier).
Presidential systems present a unique possibility for spatial competition between elected political agents, since presidents may represent different policy positions than the parties to which they belong. Previous research, however, has lacked a firm empirical basis on which to measure these differences. We remedy this situation, providing independent estimates of positions and saliencies for presidents and parties on multiple policy dimensions in 18 Latin American countries, from original expert survey data. Our results offer strong evidence that positioning on nearly all political issues neatly reduces to a single dimension of left-right contestation. Furthermore, contrasting differences between the positioning of presidents and their own parties, we show that presidents tend to position themselves independently of their parties more in bicameral and proportional representation systems, when they differ in the importance they assign to a given policy dimension, and when elections with legislatures are nonconcurrent.
2009. “Challenges for estimating policy preferences: Announcing an open access archive of political documents.” German Politics 18(3): 441–454 (with Thomas Bräuninger and Marc Debus).
2009. “Treating Words as Data with Error: Uncertainty in Text Statements of Policy Positions.” American Journal of Political Science 53(2): 495–513 (with Michael Laver and Slava Mikhaylov).
Political text offers extraordinary potential as a source of information about the policy positions of political actors. Despite recent advances in computational text analysis, human interpretative coding of text remains an important source of text‐based data, ultimately required to validate more automatic techniques. The profession's main source of cross‐national, time‐series data on party policy positions comes from the human interpretative coding of party manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). Despite widespread use of these data, the uncertainty associated with each point estimate has never been available, undermining the value of the dataset as a scientific resource. We propose a remedy. First, we characterize processes by which CMP data are generated. These include inherently stochastic processes of text authorship, as well as of the parsing and coding of observed text by humans. Second, we simulate these error‐generating processes by bootstrapping analyses of coded quasi‐sentences. This allows us to estimate precise levels of nonsystematic error for every category and scale reported by the CMP for its entire set of 3,000‐plus manifestos. Using our estimates of these errors, we show how to correct biased inferences, in recent prominently published work, derived from statistical analyses of error‐contaminated CMP data.
2009. “A Relative Impact Ranking of Political Studies In Ireland.” Economic and Social Review 40(3): 269–298 (with Michael Marsh).
Against a background of the Irish government’s concerns with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and the British government’s wishes for a more quantitative Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), our study conducts a relative impact assessment of the study of politics, government, political science, and international relations in Ireland. Impact is measured as citations from the publications of permanent staff in eight Irish politics departments, based on data compiled in April 2008 from two leading academic indexes – ISI’s Web of Science and Scopus – as well as the now popular Google Scholar. We discuss some of the criticisms that naturally arise in a study of this nature. Then, following similar exercises in other disciplines (e.g. economics), we use the impact measures to compare and rank individual scholars as well as departments. We also explore the extent to which the choice of different indexes, and different measures, influences the results that we obtain. While there are differences, in particular between indexes based purely on articles and those that access books and other material, the results from the different indexes are strongly correlated.
2009. “Party Group Switching in the European Parliament.” In Legislative Party Switching and the Foundations of Political Parties, eds. William Heller and Carol Mershon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 147–172 (with Gail McElroy).
2008. “The Campaign Value of Incumbency: A New Solution to the Puzzle of Less Effective Incumbent Spending.” American Journal of Political Science 52(4): 874–890 (with Michael Marsh).
A puzzle in research on campaign spending is that while expenditure is positively related to votes won, this effect is far more strongly, or even exclusively, enjoyed by challengers rather than by incumbents. We unearth a new explanation for the puzzle, focusing on the hidden, yet variable, campaign value of office perquisites which incumbents deploy in their campaigns to win votes. When these variable office benefits are unobserved, then the effect is to make observed incumbent spending less effective than spending by challengers. Using data from the 2002 Irish general election, where incumbency was assigned a variable campaign value and included in declared campaign spending, we are able to demonstrate this hidden incumbency effect and estimate its relationship to electoral success, in terms of overall votes, share of votes, and probability of winning a seat. Contrary to previous research showing ineffective incumbent spending, we find that when the campaign value of office is also measured, public office value “spending” is not only very effective in winning votes, but also seems to be more effective than regular incumbent spending.
2008. “Compared to What? A Comment on ‘A Robust Transformation Procedure for Interpreting Political Text’ by Martin and Vanberg.” Political Analysis 16(1): 101–111 (with Michael Laver).
In “A Robust Transformation Procedure,” Martin and Vanberg (2007, hereafter MV) propose a new method for rescaling the raw virgin text scores produced by the “Wordscores” procedure of Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, hereafter LBG). Their alternative method addresses two deficiencies they argue exist with the transformation of virgin text scores proposed by LBG: First, that the LBG transformation is sensitive to the selection of virgin texts, and second, that it distorts the reference metric by failing to recover the original reference scores when reference texts are scored and transformed as if they were virgin texts. Their proposed alternative is “robust” in the sense that it avoids both shortcomings. Not only is MV's transformation a welcome contribution to the Wordscores project but also the critical analysis on which it is based brings to light a number of assumptions and choices that face the analyst seeking to estimate actors' policy positions using statistical analyses of the texts they generate. When first describing the possibility of rescaling the raw virgin text estimates, we emphasized that our particular approach to rescaling is not fundamental to our word-scoring technique but, rather, is a matter of substantive research design unrelated to the validity of the raw virgin text scores… Other transformations are of course possible. (LBG, 316) To explore more fully into the assumptions and choices behind alternative transformations and the research designs which motivate them, we offer the following comments.
2008. Intra-Party Politics and Coalition Governments. London: Routledge (edited with Daniela Giannetti).
2008. “Intraparty politics and coalition governments in parliamentary democracies.” In Intra-Party Politics and Coalition Governments in Parliamentary Democracies, eds. Daniela Giannetti and Kenneth Benoit. London: Routledge. pp. 3–24 (with Daniela Giannetti).
2008. “Intraparty politics and coalition governance: concluding remarks.” In Intra-Party Politics and Coalition Governments in Parliamentary Democracies, eds. Daniela Giannetti and Kenneth Benoit. London: Routledge. pp. 229–235 (with Daniela Giannetti).
2008. “Expert Judgments.” In Neuere Entwicklungen und Anwendungen auf dem Gebiet der Methoden der vergleichenden Politik- und Sozialwissenschaft, eds. Susanne Pickel, Gert Pickel, Hans-Joachim Lauth, and Detlef Jahn. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. pp. 497–515 (with Nina Wiesehomeier).
2007. “Le changement des systèmes partisans et la transformation des espaces politiques.” Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée 14(2): 303–324 (with Michael Laver).
Résumé Cet article mesure le degré de changement des systèmes de partis – considérés comme le changement dans la structuration de l’espace politique sous-jacent ou le changement dans les positions des partis dans ce même espace – en Europe occidentale. Le changement est mesuré à partir de deux sondages d’experts, directement comparables, concernant la position des partis sur quatre dimensions politiques « clés ». Ces enquêtes ont été conduites en 1989 et en 2003. Une distinction est faite entre les partis « survivants », en compétition à la fois en 1989 et en 2003, les « nouveaux » partis, en compétition en 2003 mais pas en 1989, et les partis « éteints », en compétition en 1989 mais plus en 2003. Les principaux résultats concernent : le changement d’importance relative des dimensions politiques clés, ainsi que les corrélations entre les positions des partis sur celles-ci ; les tendances historiques dans le positionnement politique des partis européens ; et peut-être plus frappant encore, une tendance distincte à la naissance de « nouveaux » partis et à l’extinction des « anciens » partis situés sur une position relativement extrême dans l’espace politique.
2007. “Electoral Laws as Political Consequences: Explaining the Origins and Change of Electoral Institutions.” Annual Review of Political Science 10: 363–390.
In this review article, I identify the key questions raised by the treatment of electoral systems not as causal influences on party systems but as effects or byproducts of party systems. Framing these questions in the context of the classic consequences-oriented study of electoral institutions, I first review the classic approach, which treats electoral systems as causes, and explore the potential implications when electoral systems are viewed instead as outcomes of party systems. I then survey a variety of principal explanations of the origins and change of electoral laws, followed by a focus on several of the more explicitly defined models of this process. I conclude by discussing—and contesting—the notion that except for exceptional founding episodes of institutional choice, electoral systems eventually stabilize as equilibrium institutions.
2007. “Benchmarks for Text Analysis: A Reply to Budge and Pennings.” Electoral Studies 26: 130–135 (with Michael Laver).
2007. “Estimating party policy positions: Comparing expert surveys and hand-coded content analysis.” Electoral Studies 26: 90–107 (with Michael Laver).
In this paper we compare estimates of the left-right positions of political parties derived from an expert survey recently completed by the authors with those derived by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) from the content analysis of party manifestos. Having briefly described the expert survey, we first explore the substantive policy content of left and right in the expert survey estimates. We then compare the expert survey to the CMP method on methodological grounds. Third, we directly compare the expert survey results to the CMP results for the most recent time period available, revealing some agreement but also numerous inconsistencies in both cross-national and within-country party placements. We conclude by investigating the CMP scores in more detail, focusing on the series of British left-right placements and the components of these scores.
2007. “Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament.” Party Politics 13(1): 5–28 (with Gail McElroy).
As the legislative body of the European Union (EU), the European Parliament (EP) comprises 732 elected representatives from over 150 national political parties from 25 member states. At the EP level, these members are affiliated with seven major party groups representing distinct policy positions. Here we provide precise estimates of these policy positions based on expert surveys, in addition to characterizing the dimensionality of policy competition in the EP. Our results suggest not only that party groups have identifiable and differentiated positions on multiple issues of policy, but also that these positions group broadly into two orthogonal dimensions: one consisting of classic left-right social and economic issues, and the other related to the powers and scope of EU institutions.
2006. “Voter Strategies with Restricted Choice Menus.” British Journal of Political Science 36(3): 459–485 (with Daniela Giannetti and Michael Laver).
Mixed-member electoral systems require voters simultaneously to cast ballots in single-member districts (SMD) and multimember, proportional representation (PR) constituencies. It may be that not all parties offer candidates in both electoral contexts, however. In this event would-be voters for some parties may find themselves ‘frustrated’ by the restricted choice menu on offer in the SMD, being effectively forced to split their vote between different parties. Here we explore the different behaviours of frustrated voters in the 1996 mixed-member election to Italy's Chamber of Deputies, characterizing these as being either in some sense non-strategic (concerned above all with the relative policy platforms of candidates) or strategic (concerned above all to influence the eventual composition of government). Using an extended method for ecological inference, we parameterize and estimate rates of different types of ticket-splitting at the district level, and link the degree of what we characterize as strategic voting to the relative policy distance between the respective local representatives of the Italian pre-electoral coalitions.
2006. “Policy Competition in the 2002 French Legislative and Presidential Elections.” European Journal of Political Research 45(4): 667–697 (with Michael Laver and Nicolas Sauger).
The French two‐round system of presidential elections forces candidates to choose strategies designed to maximize their votes in two different, potentially conflicting strategic contexts: a first round contest between many candidates, and a second round between (typically) a left‐ and a right‐oriented candidate. Following a constitutional change in 2000, furthermore, presidential elections are synchronized with legislative elections, more tightly linking presidential candidates to the policy platforms of the parties they represent. This article examines the consequences of policy positioning by presidential candidates, measuring, comparing and assessing positioning in the legislative elections and in the first and second presidential election rounds. The measures come from an expert survey taken in 2002, from content analysis of party manifestos and presidential speeches, and from the 2002 French National Election Survey. The findings provide hard empirical confirmation of two commonly perceived propositions: first, that Jospin's first‐round loss resulted from strategic error in moving too close to the policy centre, and second, that Chirac's won an overwhelming second‐round victory because he collected all of the voters from candidates eliminated in the first round.
2006. “Duverger’s Law and the Study of Electoral Systems.” French Politics 4(1): 69–83.
Since its first publication in 1951, Duverger’s Political Parties has influenced an entire branch of political science devoted to the study of the political consequences of electoral laws. This essay examines the two propositions known as Duverger’s law and Duverger’s hypothesis, both concerned with how electoral institutions shape party systems. First explaining the propositions and their context, the essay examines their influence on political science, and concludes by assessing where future research in the area might be best concentrated.
2006. Party Policy in Modern Democracies. London: Routledge (with Michael Laver).
2006. “Hungary: Protection of Ethnic Minorities and Institutional Balance.” In Policy-making Processes and the European Constitution: A comparative study of member states and accession countries, eds. Thomas König and Simon Hug. London: Routledge. pp. 119–127 (with Anna Gwiazda).
2006. “Automated Content Analysis of Political Texts using Wordscores.” APSA-CP Newsletter 17(1, Winter): 6–9 (with Michael Laver).
2005. “Measuring National Delegate Positions at the Convention on the Future of Europe Using Computerized Wordscoring.” European Union Politics 6(3): 291–313 (with Michael Laver, Christine Arnold, Madeleine O. Hosli, and Paul Pennings).
The Convention on the Future of Europe that led to the eventual drafting of an EU Constitution involved numerous political actors from many countries. Their negotiations over the constitution generated a huge volume of texts containing substantive information about their preferences for EU institutional and political outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to measure these preferences at the national party level by analysing the Convention texts using the computerized ‘word-scoring’ method for text analysis (Laver et al., 2003). For each national party whose delegates’ texts were recorded at the Convention, we estimate their positions on four political dimensions. We then test the validity of these estimates by comparing them with measures of national party positions on EU policy dimensions obtained through an extensive expert survey undertaken in 27 countries (the EU 25 plus Turkey and Romania). Our results show strong evidence that the word-scoring method is broadly successful in reconstructing the map of national party preferences for and against a more centralized and more powerful Europe as expressed through the Convention texts.
2005. “Estimating Party Policy Positions: Japan in Comparative Context.” Japanese Journal of Political Science 6(2): 187–209 (with Michael Laver).
This paper first reviews a number of epistemological and methodological issues relating to the estimation of party policy positions, particularly in a comparative context, with special reference to the methodology of ‘expert surveys’. It is argued that expert surveys, as systematic summaries of the views of country specialists, have a particular role in assessing the content validity of other types of estimates of party policy positions. The paper moves on to analyze the positions of Japanese political parties in a comparative context, using results from a new 47-country expert survey. Attention is paid both to the substantive policy content of the left–right dimension in Japan, and to the locations of Japanese parties in policy spaces, relative to the locations of comparable parties in other political systems.
2005. “Mapping the Irish Policy Space: Voter and Party Spaces in Preferential Elections.” Economic and Social Review 36(2): 83–108 (with Michael Laver).
In this note we map the Irish policy space, locating both voters and parties on the most salient policy dimensions in Ireland. Estimates of the voter locations are based on the Irish National Election Survey (INES), conducted in 2002. Estimates of the party positions are based on an expert survey of party positions conducted by the authors in late 2002. We show that respondent self-placements on a priori policy scales are highly biased and difficult to interpret, and we rely instead on building scale positions for respondents from their answers to relevant attitude questions in the INES. The results provide a methodological template for locating voters and parties in a common space – a significant problem for any analyst who wants to create an empirical elaboration of a spatial model of party competition.
2005. “Hungary: Holding Back the Tiers.” In The Politics of Electoral Systems, eds. Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 231–252.
2005. “How Qualitative Research Really Counts.” Qualitative Methods Newsletter (Spring).
2004. “Institutional Change and Persistence: The Evolution of Poland’s Electoral System 1989-2001.” Journal of Politics 66(2): 396–427 (with Jacqueline Hayden).
Electoral systems are uniquely distributive political institutions that shape political outcomes, yet are themselves endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. In Poland, party system development has involved not only parties adapting to electoral institutions in each election, but also parties modifying these institutions prior to every election. We model electoral system change as driven by partisan self-interest in maximizing seat share and test it in five episodes of electoral system change in Poland from 1989 to 2001, comparing parties’ support for electoral law alternatives to their expectations of seat shares from those alternatives. Data consists of opinion polls, roll-call votes, Sejm records, constitutional committee transcripts, and interviews with political actors who designed and chose the Polish electoral institutions. The findings clearly show that party support for each electoral law was closely linked to the perceived effect on that party’s seat share, with this linkage growing more consistent over time.
2004. “Models of Electoral System Change.” Electoral Studies 23: 363–389.
Electoral systems are commonly treated as exogenous determinants of political party systems, yet our theoretical understanding remains limited as to how these institutions themselves are determined. Part of the problem lies with the subject matter itself: electoral system change is frequently idiosyncratic, often occurring during episodes of exceptional political change. Yet another aspect of the problem is that explanations of electoral system change frequently occur piecemeal in application to specific cases, without systematic or comparative development. Addressing both problems, I first survey the existing literature to develop a comprehensive typology of explanations of electoral system change and persistence. I then set forth a theory predicting the conditions under which electoral systems should change, linking motivations for institutional change to instrumentally rational political parties seeking to maximize their legislative seat shares. The theory predicts that electoral laws will change when a coalition of parties exists such that each party in the coalition expects to gain more seats under an alternative electoral institution, and that also has sufficient power to effect this alternative through fiat given the rules for changing electoral laws. To contrast this model to other explanations of electoral system change, I point to its observable implications and outline how it could be confirmed or disconfirmed in empirical research. The comparison also highlights limitations in other approaches to explaining electoral system change, and underscores the importance of institutions in inducing equilibriums in both electoral systems and party systems.
2004. “Multi-Party Split-Ticket Voting Estimation as an Ecological Inference Problem.” In Gary King, Ori Rosen, and Martin Tanner, eds. Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (with Michael Laver and Daniela Giannetti).
2004. “Spain and European Union Constitution-Building.” Working paper 2004/17, Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos (Madrid, July 18) (with Raj Chari, Alfonso Egea de Haro, and Michael Laver).
2003. “Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data.” American Political Science Review 97(2): 311–331 (with Michael Laver and John Garry).
We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We “export” the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our “language-blind” word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.
2003. “The Evolution of Party Systems Between Elections.” American Journal of Political Science 47(2): 215–233 (with Michael Laver).
Most existing theoretical work on party competition pays little attention to the evolution of party systems between elections as a result of defections between parties. In this article, we treat individual legislators as utility‐maximizing agents tempted to defect to other parties if this would increase their expected payoffs. We model the evolution of party systems between elections in these terms and discuss this analytically, exploring unanswered questions using computational methods. Under office‐seeking motivational assumptions, our results strikingly highlight the role of the largest party, especially when it is “dominant” in the technical sense, as a pole of attraction in interelectoral evolution.
2003. “Campaign Spending in the Local Government Elections of 1999.” Irish Political Studies 18(2): 1–22 (with Michael Marsh).
For the first time in Irish electoral history, the 1999 local elections required candidates to publicly declare their campaign expenditures. Drawing on these data, we explore patterns in campaign spending and assess their impact, both on candidate success and on turnout. First, examining the elections contested by 1,838 candidates from 180 local constituencies and 34 councils, we identify both partisan and geographic spending patterns, and examine how well these can be explained as a function of political and demographic variables. Second, we model and estimate the effects of expenditure on individual electoral outcomes. The findings clearly indicate that even at the relatively miniscule spending levels found in Irish local elections, spending is positively and significantly related to electoral success. Finally, we explore the impact of expenditure on overall turnout and find a clear positive effect of per capita expenditure on turnout.
2003. “Estimating Irish Party Positions Using Computer Wordscoring: The 2002 Elections.” Irish Political Studies 18(1): 97–107 (with Michael Laver).
2003. “For A Few Euros More: Campaign Spending Effects in the Irish Local Elections of 1999.” Party Politics 9(5): 561–582 (with Michael Marsh).
Although perceived by candidates and parties as important in affecting political outcomes, the link between spending and success in multi-candidate, multiparty election campaigns remains unproven. Not only are there relatively few studies of campaign spending effects in multi-party systems, there are none examining the effect under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system. Our study examines spending effects in the Irish local elections of 1999 using STV with district magnitudes between 3 and 7 seats, contested by a median of 10 candidates in each district. Using detailed data on 1,838 candidates from 180 local constituencies and 30 councils, we provide precise estimates of the relationship between campaign spending at the candidate level in each district and electoral success, including the probability of winning. In a context where spending is miniscule relative to other contexts, and takes place under a completely different electoral system, our results echo previous studies from other contexts showing a strong effect of challenger spending and only weak effects of incumbent spending. Once allowance is made for the endogeneity of incumbent spending, however, we find a much less substantial difference between the effectiveness of spending by challengers and by incumbents, except on the marginal effect of spending on the probability of winning, where challenger spending is shown to be much more important.
2003. “Randomized Treatment Study of Inosiplex Versus Combined Inosiplex and Intraventricular Interferon-α.” Journal of Child Neurology 18: 819–827 (with Generoso G. Gascon and et al.).
The efficacy of oral inosiplex alone (group A) versus combined treatment of inosiplex (Isoprinosine) and intraventricular interferon-alpha2b (Intron A) (group B) in patients with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) was compared. One hundred and twenty-one patients who met the diagnostic criteria for subacute sclerosing panencephalitis and presented at stage 2 or less were randomized into group A or B. Data were analyzable on 67 patients who met the inclusion criteria and adhered to the protocol. The inosiplex dosage was 100 mg/kg/day to a maximum of 3 g/day, taken orally in three divided doses for 6 months. Interferon-alpha2b started with 100,000 U/m2 and escalated to 1,000,000 U/m2 over 5 inpatient days and then 1,000,000 U/m2 twice a week for 6 months. Neurologic status was rated by the Neurological Disability Index, Brief Assessment Examination, and stages. Kaplan-Meier survival rates were not statistically significant between group A and group B (log-rank test chi2 = .1374, P = .7109). In longitudinal morbidity analyses, regression results were fitted to three outcome measures: the Neurological Disability Index, the Brief Assessment Examination, and stage. Group medians of the estimated regression slopes were then compared using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test. There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups on any of these three measures. Morbidity comparisons of clinical classification of outcomes (improvement, stabilization, worsening after treatment stopped, deterioration) also showed no statistically significant difference between groups. There were no statistically significant differences between the two treatment groups on any efficacy measure. However, the observed rates of satisfactory outcome (stabilization, improvement) of 34% in group A and 35% in group B were higher than the spontaneous remission rates of 5 to 10% reported in the literature, suggesting that treatment was superior to no treatment.
2002. “Like Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Hungarian Elections of 2002.” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 18(4): 119–133.
2002. “Locating TDs in Policy Spaces: Wordscoring Dáil Speeches.” Irish Political Studies 17(1): 59–73 (with Michael Laver).
This article adapts a new technique for the computerised analysis of political texts, previously used to analyse party manifestos, to the analysis of speeches made in a legislature. The benefits of computerised text analysis come from the ability to analyse, for the first time, complex and daunting electronic sources of text, such as the parliamentary record. This allows the systematic estimation of the policy positions of individual political actors, with huge benefits both for theory development and empirical analysis. In this article, the technique is used to analyse all 58 English language speeches made in the October 1991 confidence debate on the future of the incumbent Fianna Fáil-PD coalition. The task was to use the words spoken in the debate to locate every one of the individual speakers on a 'pro- versus anti-government' dimension. The purpose was, first, to examine the validity of computerised text analysis when applied to legislative speeches and, second, to answer substantively interesting questions about the positions of individual Irish legislators in 1991. The results vindicate the use of computerised analysis in the context of legislative speeches and locate all speakers in the 1991 debate in a substantively interesting policy space.
2002. “The Endogeneity Problem in Electoral Studies: A Critical Reexamination of Duverger’s Mechanical Effect.” Electoral Studies 21(1): 35–46.
Studies of electoral law consequences typically treat electoral laws as exogenous factors affecting political party systems, even while acknowledging that political parties often tailor electoral institutions to suit their own distributional needs. This study represents a departure from that approach, directly examining one aspect of the endogeneity of electoral systems: the endogeneity of Duverger’s ‘mechanical’ effect. Theory clearly posits that the Duvergerian ‘psychological’ effect of electoral rules occurs in anticipation of their reductive mechanical effect, yet in empirical models this endogenous character is typically ignored. In this paper I formalize the two types of Duvergerian effects of electoral laws in a structural model and implement this model using two-stage-least-squares regression to re-estimate the mechanical effect model of Amorim Neto and Cox [Electoral institutions, cleavage structures, and the number of parties. Am. J. Polit. Sci. 41 (1997) 149–174] and Cox [Making Votes Count: Strategic Communication in the World’s Electoral Systems. Cambridge University Press (1997)]. I also generalize the model and compare it to two other approaches taken by Ordeshook and Shvetsova [Ethnic heterogeneity, district magnitude, and the number of parties. Am. J. Polit. Sci. 38 (1994) 100–123] and Taagepera and Shugart [Predicting the number of parties: a quantitative model of Duverger’s mechanical effect. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 87 (1993) 455–464]. The results indicate that because electoral structure affects the number of parties in the legislature both directly through the mechanical effect as well as indirectly through the psychological effect, simple OLS estimates that do not take into account this endogenous model will overestimate the mechanical effect by 45–100%.
2002. “Hungary.” In Sara Pendergast and Thomas Pendergast, eds. Worldmark Encyclopedia of National Economies. 4 vols. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group.
2001. “Institutional Choice in New Democracies: Bargaining Over Hungary’s 1989 Electoral Law.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 13(2): 153–182 (with John W. Schiemann).
Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. Such choices are especially significant during transitions to democracy, when initial institutional designs fundamentally structure the path of democratic development. Most theories of institutional emergence, however, focus on stable contexts rather than on the conditions of acute uncertainty identified in the standard transitions literature. Our article attempts to bridge the two subfields by outlining and applying a model of institutional choice as the outcome of a struggle between fledgling opposition parties and the authoritarian regime wherein each side struggles to gain the greatest distributive payoff. We examine the creation of the Hungarian electoral system of 1989, linking the positions of the participants to the institutional alternatives which they expected to maximize their expected seat shares in the election to take place under those rules. The evidence shows that the individual parties generally preferred alternatives that maximized their expected seats, subject to the constraint of not derailing the negotiations as a whole. When a party had the possibility to reduce its uncertainty, it also tended to shift to a position reflecting its updated evaluation of an institutional alternative's effect on its expected seats. Far from being paralyzed by uncertainty and lack of information, actors in the choice of Hungary's 1989 electoral law were, with minor exceptions, able to effectively link institutional outcomes to electoral self-interest and to pursue these distributive gains through bargaining.
2001. “District Magnitude, Electoral Formula, and the Number of Parties.” European Journal of Political Research 39(2): 203–224.
Duverger's propositions concerning the psychological and mechanical consequences of electoral rules have previously been examined mainly through the lens of district magnitude, comparing the properties of single–member district plurality elections with those of multimember proportional representation elections. The empirical consequences of multimember plurality (MMP) rules, on the other hand, have received scant attention. Theory suggests that the effect of district magnitude on the number and concentration of parties will differ with regard to whether the allocation rules are plurality–based or proportional. I test this theory by drawing on a uniquely large–sample dataset where district magnitude and electoral formula vary but the basic universe of political parties is held constant, applying regression analysis to data from several thousand Hungarian local bodies elected in 1994 consisting of municipal councils, county councils, and mayors. The results indicate that omitting the variable of electoral formula has the potential to cause significant bias in estimates of Duvergerian consequences of district magnitude. In addition, the analysis of multi–member plurality elections from the local election dataset reveals counter–intuitively that candidate and party entry may increase with district magnitude under MMP, suggesting important directions for future investigation of MMP rules.
2001. “Evaluating Hungary’s Mixed-Member Electoral System.” In Matthew Shugart and Martin Wattenberg, eds. Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2001. “Simulation Methodologies for Political Scientists.” The Political Methodologist 10(1, Fall): 12–16.
2001. “Review of Doing Research in Political Science: An Introduction to Comparative Methods and Statistics, by Paul Pennings, Hans Keman and Jan Kleinnijenhuis.” Acta Politica: International Journal of Political Science 36 (Spring): 107–109.
2001. “Authoritarianism; Military Dictatorship; One-party State.” Entries for A Reader’s Guide to the Social Sciences. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Press.
2000. “Which Electoral Formula is the Most Proportional? A New Look with New Evidence.” Political Analysis 8(4): 381–388.
A ranking exists in electoral systems research of different electoral formulas—the mathematical functions governing the conversion of votes into legislative seats—in terms of both proportionality of seats and votes and favorability to the largest party. I reexamine this issue with new methods and new evidence, attempting to cross-validate previous rankings using a larger and more controlled data set and more precise parametric methods than have been applied previously. The results by and large confirm previous knowledge but also illuminate several important new facets obscured in previous investigations. For example, at common ranges of district magnitude (from 5 to 15 seats), it is shown that electoral formula may matter at least as much as district magnitude in shaping proportionality.
1999. “Votes and Seats: The Hungarian Electoral Law and the 1994 Parliamentary Elections.” In Founding Elections in Eastern Europe: Elections to the 1994 Hungarian National Assembly, eds. Gábor Tóka and Zsolt Enyedi. Berlin: Sigma.
1998. “Forecasting the Outcome of the 1998 Parliamentary Elections.” In Sándor Kurtán, Péter Sándor, and László Vass, eds., Hungarian Political Yearbook 1997 [in Hungarian]. Budapest: Demokrácia Kutatások Magyar Központja Alapítvány.
1997. “Forecasting the 1998 [Hungarian] Parliamentary Elections.” [In Hungarian] Századvég 5 (Summer): 149–166.
1997. “Why I Use Linux.” The Political Methodologist 8(1, Fall): 29–33.
1996. “A Preview of EI and EzI: Programs for Ecological Inference.” Social Science Computer Review 14(4): 433–438 (with Gary King).
1996. “Hungary’s Two-Vote Electoral System.” Representation 33(4): 162–170.
‘Arguably the most complex parliamentary voting system in the world’. The following article describes the formulation of Hungary’s ‘two-vote’ system.
1996. “Democracies Really Are More Pacific (In General): Reexamining Regime Type and War Involvement.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 40(4): 636–657.
Current consensus in the field of democratic peace research holds that democratic states go to war in general no less than nondemocratic states. The author challenges this consensus by reevaluating the main empirical studies on which it rests, using information that previous studies ignored and statistical techniques unused or even unknown at the time. The results indicate that from 1960 to 1980, democratic nations were less involved in military conflict than other regime types. Estimates of this relationship are robust to different operational definitions of both war and democracy, to the addition of control variables for other possible correlates of war, and to the application of different statistical techniques. This indicates that lack of previous significant findings have less to do with the data than with the methods used to analyze them.
1995. “Electoral Systems and Minority Representation.” In Paul Peterson ed., Classifying by Race. Princeton: Princeton University Press (with Kenneth Shepsle).
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