Quick Paper Listing:

REBELS WITH A CAUSE? LEGISLATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE PERSONAL VOTE IN BRITAIN, 1997--2005

Does a Member of the British Parliament's voting record have any effect on their constituency electoral performance? Scholars have assumed not, else they have tested the proposition with an extremely limited number of roll calls. Congruent with public opinion findings we contend that, paradoxically, voters conditionally reward both 'party unity' and 'independent mindedness' in their elected representatives. Using novel non-parametric 'random forest' classification procedures, and a new data set recording behavior on over 2000 roll calls from 1997--2001 and 2001--2005, along with commensurate constituency controls, we thus show that MPs' popularity is indeed effected by their legislative activity in small but significant ways. In particular, government-party voters demand unity on votes that are key parts of the government's programmatic agenda, while welcoming more 'maverick' behavior on less important issues.

SCALING THE CRITICS: UNCOVERING THE LATENT DIMENSIONS OF MOVIE CRITICISM WITH AN ITEM RESPONSE APPROACH (with Michael Peress)

Forthcoming Journal of the American Statistical Association

IDENTIFYING INTRA-PARTY VOTING BLOCS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM HOUSE OF COMMONS (with Kevin Quinn)

Forthcoming Journal of the American Statistical Association

POWER TOOL- MEASURING POWER IN POLITICAL SCIENCE: A NEW METHOD WITH APPLICATION TO THE SENATE

The measurement of power, even in structured settings like legislatures, has proved elusive. We discuss the problems with traditional, a priori voting indices approaches and suggest a data-driven, actor-based, (logistic regression) method that is straightforward to implement. This treatment is consistent with systematic theoretical models and discussions of power, and formally allows the separation of 'power' from its causes. To illustrate the strengths of this new technique, we apply the model to the 108th United States Senate. We find that institutional, ideological, personal and geographic variables all influence senators' power.

DYNAMICS OF TWO PARTY COMPETITION: EMPIRICAL ESTIMATION OF A THEORETICAL MODEL (with Tasos Kalandrakis)

Under revision

THE NEXT BIG THING: SCALE INVARIANCE IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

`Power laws' suggest that events of a large magnitude will be rare, whilst small events will be much more common, and that a simple mathematical law relates `severity' with frequency. We find that a wide variety of phenomena in political science are power law distributed. These empirical regularities are both unexpected and unexplained. More work on a general explanatory theory for these patterns is desirable.

TURNING POINTS IN THE IRAQ CONFLICT: REVERSIBLE JUMP MARKOV CHAIN MONTE CARLO IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

The American Statistician, 61:4, 2007

BAYESIAN APPROACHES FOR LIMITED DEPENDENT VARIABLE CHANGE POINT PROBLEMS

Political Analysis, 15(4), 2007

UNDER THE INFLUENCE? INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE IN POLITICAL SCIENCE (with David Carter)

PS: Political Science and Politics, 41(2), 2007

THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF ROLL CALLS (with Iain McLean)

Government and Opposition, 41(4), 561--568.

UK OC OK? INTERPRETING OPTIMAL CLASSIFICATION SCORES FOR THE UNITED KINGDOM HOUSE OF COMMONS (with Iain McLean)

Political Analysis 15 (1) Winter, 2007.

TAPIR AND THE PUBLIC WHIP: RESOURCES FOR WESTMINSTER VOTING (with David Firth)

The Political Methodologist 14 (2)

NONE OF THE ABOVE: THE UK HOUSE OF COMMONS VOTES ON REFORMING THE HOUSE OF LORDS, FEBRUARY 2003 (with Iain McLean and Meg Russell)

The Political Quarterly, 74, 298--310.