Methods

The Constraining Power of International Treaties: Theory and Methods

American Political Science Review, co-authored with Beth Simmons, 2005, 99(4):623-631

Owing to self-selection, estimating treaty effects is challenging, as countries are more likely to sign treaties if they expect to comply with them. This paper argues that treaties can both screen among states and then constrain those states that become signatories. It uses propensity score matching, and finds that signing onto the International Monetary Fund's Article VIII has a marked impact on signatories' behavior. [Data]

 

Extracting Systematic Social Science Meaning from Text

American Journal of Political Science, co-authored with Gary King, 2010, 54(1):229-247

The explosion of blogs and other digitized text presents opportunities to measure public opinion in new ways.  This paper presents methods of automated content analysis that give approximately unbiased estimates of the proportion of documents falling into pre-specified categories.  It then applies these methods to data on thousands of web logs about the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. [Data] [R Package] [R Packgage for Windows]

 

Improving Anchoring Vignettes: Designing Surveys to Correct Interpersonal Incomparability

Public Opinion Quarterly, co-authored with Gary King, 2010, 74(2):201-222

Anchoring vignettes are an increasingly common tool to reduce differences in how respondents interpret survey questions.  This paper uses survey experiments to develop insights about how to design surveys with anchoring vignettes. It shows that placing vignettes prior to a self-assessment question can prime respondents, improving the measurement of the underlying concept. It also develops advice for survey questions that ask respondents to compare themselves to others. [Data]

 

The Inside View: Using the Enron Email Archive to Understand Business Lobbying

Forthcoming, Legislative Studies Quarterly; SSRN Working Paper 1643658, co-authored with Lee Drutman

This paper exploits the public release of more than 200,000 internal emails by the Enron Corporation to better understand the types of lobbying that Enron engaged in.  Enron devoted only a small fraction of its attention to campaigns and elections, and was far more active in formally participating in bureaucratic processes than previous work might suggest.  It also uses tools from automated content analysis to focus attention on political emails.  [Award: Best Paper, Political Organizations and Parties Section of APSA, 2010]