Research Agenda
My research focuses on two broad areas: legislative institutions and political methodology. My current research explores the linkages between partisan institutional arrangements in legislatures and legislative voting behavior. Specifically, I am interested in how theories of partisan influences on lawmaking shape the complex decision processes of legislators. At the moment, I am working on an estimation procedure that allows scholars to disentangle the partisan and electoral effects on legislators' voting records.
A more detailed research agenda can be found here.
Working Papers
"Weighing the Alternatives: Preferences, Parties, and Constituency and Roll Call Voting" (job market paper; draft complete)
Abstract: Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences
for empirical analysis (e.g., Aldrich and Rohde 1998, 2000; Cox and McCubbins 2005; Krehbiel 1998).
However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care
only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party line (Poole and Rosenthal
1997; Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004), though substantive scholars have for decades hypothesized
otherwise (e.g., Fenno 1973; Clausen 1973; Sinclair 1995; Smith 2007). To this end, I develop a new statistical
estimator to determine the weights legislators place on their preferences, party, and constituency in roll
call voting. Estimation is performed within a Maximum Likelihood framework via the "zig-zag" technique
of Heckman and Macurdy (1980; see also Poole and Rosenthal 1997). The results help to explain the
gap between estimated ideal points and legislators' true preferences and, thereby, have important
implications for lawmaking theories, as well as theories of representation.
""Missing in Action: A Bayesian Hierarchical Model of NA/DK Resonses in Surveys" (Revise and Resubmit, Political Analysis)
Abstract: The problem of missing data is virtually endemic to political science research. Popular
imputation techniques (e.g. Rubin 1987, King et al. 2001) have become widespread
and are incredibly useful. However, there are many instances when modeling the
mechanism of missingness directly will improve over both of these extant techniques
in terms of model fit and, more importantly, theoretical microfoundations. This paper
seeks to fill this gap in the methodological literature, with a particular emphasis on
survey data. Specifically, I propose a new approach tomodeling NA/DK responses in
ordinal survey questions as the products of choice on the part of respondents. Drawing
insights from the marketing literature (Bradlow and Zaslavsky 1999), I present
a Bayesian hierarchical model that treats responses as the product of multiple latent
variables: saliency, opinion, and decisiveness. Estimation is performed by MCMC
methods, employing the data augmentation technique of Tanner and Wong (1987)
due to the lack of closed-form conditional posterior distributions. An application to
citizens’ perception of candidate ideology is presented. The results provide both new
and different insights that are missed by extant methods (e.g., listwise deletion and
multiple imputation).
"National Survival and the Confederate Congress" (under review)
Abstract: I analyze the voting behavior of legislators in the Congresses of the Confederate States of America
during the American Civil War. I show that the occupation of Confederate Congressional
districts by Federal troops led legislators to abandon their previous voting behavior and instead
support the strengthening of the central government in Richmond. Specific case evidence involving
voting on habeus corpus is provided to further demonstrate the robustness of this result.
Most important, the result leads to outcomes at odds with the logic of secession as enunciated
by Southern elites.
"Bail Bond: Constituency, Preferences, and the 2008 Bailout Votes" (in progress)
"When Loyalty is Tested: Do Party Leaders Use Committee Assignments as Rewards?” (with Nicole Asmussen; in progress)
"The Spatial Model and Lebanese Elections: The Song Remains the Same" (in progress)