Publications
2026. “Measuring issue salience for political parties using LLMs.” West European Politics (with Michael Laver).
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.
2025. “Forging The Future: How AI is rewriting the rules of knowledge, expertise, and practice.” Asian Management Insights 12(2): 12–19.
2024. “AI and Data Science for Public Policy.” LSE Public Policy Review 3(3): 1–6.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
2015. “The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent During Economic Crisis.” Journal of Politics 77(4): 1157–1175 (with Alexander Herzog).
2015. “The Basic Arithmetic of Legislative Decisions.” American Journal of Political Science 59(2): 275–291 (with Michael Laver).
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).
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.
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.
2009. “Presidents, Parties And Policy Competition.” Journal of Politics 71(4): 1435–1447 (with Nina Wiesehomeier).
2009. “A Relative Impact Ranking of Political Studies In Ireland.” Economic and Social Review 40(3): 269–298 (with Michael Marsh).
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.
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.
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).
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. “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. “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. “Duverger’s Law and the Study of Electoral Systems.” French Politics 4(1): 69–83.
2005. “Mapping the Irish Policy Space: Voter and Party Spaces in Preferential Elections.” Economic and Social Review 36(2): 83–108 (with Michael Laver).
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. “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.
2004. “Models of Electoral System Change.” Electoral Studies 23: 363–389.
2004. “Institutional Change and Persistence: The Evolution of Poland’s Electoral System 1989-2001.” Journal of Politics 66(2): 396–427 (with Jacqueline Hayden).
2003. “Campaign Spending in the Local Government Elections of 1999.” Irish Political Studies 18(2): 1–22 (with Michael Marsh).
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. “Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data.” American Political Science Review 97(2): 311–331 (with Michael Laver and John Garry).
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. “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.).
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).
2002. “The Endogeneity Problem in Electoral Studies: A Critical Reexamination of Duverger’s Mechanical Effect.” Electoral Studies 21(1): 35–46.
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. “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.
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.
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.
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.
2008. Intra-Party Politics and Coalition Governments. London: Routledge (edited with Daniela Giannetti).
2006. Party Policy in Modern Democracies. London: Routledge (with Michael Laver).
2012. quanteda: quantitative analysis of textual data (R package). R package, 2012–present.
2004. Party Policy in Modern Democracies. Expert survey scores of policy positions of political parties in 47 countries. Accompanies book of same title. Available from https://www.tcd.ie/PoliticalScience/ppmd/ (with Michael Laver).
2003. Wordscores: Software for Coding Political Texts. Software for Stata (requires Stata).
1996. EzI: A(n Easy) Program for Ecological Inference. Computer software for MS-DOS, OS/2, and Windows 95. Development language: Gauss. Winner of the 1998 APSA Best Research Software Award (with Gary King).
1999. Record of American Democracy, 1984-1990. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Number 2162 (with Gary King, Bradley Palmquist, Greg Adams, Micah Altman, Claudine Gay, Jeffrey B. Lewis, Kenneth R. Mayer, and Eric Reinhardt).
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. “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).
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).
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).
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. “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).
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
1995. “Electoral Systems and Minority Representation.” In Paul Peterson ed., Classifying by Race. Princeton: Princeton University Press (with Kenneth Shepsle).
2021. “Textual Data Science with R.” The American Statistician 75(4): 453–454.
2006. “Automated Content Analysis of Political Texts using Wordscores.” APSA-CP Newsletter 17(1, Winter): 6–9 (with Michael Laver).
2005. “How Qualitative Research Really Counts.” Qualitative Methods Newsletter (Spring).
2002. “Hungary.” In Sara Pendergast and Thomas Pendergast, eds. Worldmark Encyclopedia of National Economies. 4 vols. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group.
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.
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.
2007. “A Policy Model of Party Group Formation in the European Parliament.” 21st Century COE program ‘Invention of Policy Systems in Advanced Countries’ Occasional Paper. University of Tokyo (with Gail McElroy).
2006. “Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament.” Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper No. 101 (with Gail McElroy).
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).
1997. “Bargaining and Institutional Choice: The Origins of Hungary’s 1989 Electoral Law.” Center for International Affairs Working Paper No. 97-5. Harvard University (with John W. Schiemann).
1994. “Re-examining Regime Type and War Involvement.” Center for International Affairs Working Paper No. 94-5. Harvard University.
2017. “Scaling Text with the Class Affinity Model.” London School of Economics and New York University manuscript (with Patrick Perry).
2007. “Mapping Policy Preferences with Uncertainty: Measuring and Correcting Error in Comparative Manifesto Project Estimates.” Paper presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 30 August-2 September (with Michael Laver and Slava Mikhaylov).
2005. “National Party Competition and Support for European Integration.” Presented at the ECPR General Conference, 8-10 September 2005, Budapest, Hungary (with Alex Baturo).
2005. “The Integer Arithmetic of Legislative Dynamics.” Paper presented at the Workshop on Party Switching, July 10-14, 2005, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (with Michael Laver).
2002. “Extracting Policy Positions From Political Texts Using Phrases as Data: A Research Note.” Paper presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton and Towers, Chicago, IL, 3-6 April (with Michael Laver).
2001. “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Electoral Coordination in the Hungarian Elections of 1998.” Trinity College manuscript.
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