"Turning Points" in the Iraq Conflict: Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Political Science

We consider and explore structural breaks in a day-by-day time series of civilian casualties for the current Iraq conflict: an undertaking of potential interest to scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics. We re- view Bayesian change-point techniques already used by political methodologists before advocating and briefly describing the use of reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to solve the estimation problem at hand. We find evidence of four change points, all associated with increasing violence, approximately contemporaneous with some important state building events. We conclude with a discussion of avenues for future research.Governmen

Identifying Intra-Party Voting Blocs in UK House of Commons

Legislative voting records are an important source of information about legislator preferences, intra-party cohesiveness, and the divisiveness of various policy issues. Standard methods of analyzing a legislative voting record tend to have serious drawbacks when applied to legislatures, such as the UK House of Commons, that feature highly disciplined parties, strategic voting, and large amounts of missing data. We present a method (based on a Dirichlet process mixture model) for analyzing such voting records that does not suffer from these same problems. Our method is model-based and thus allows one to make probability statements about quantities of interest. It allows one to estimate the number of voting blocs within a party or any other group of MPs. Finally, it can be used as both a predictive model and an exploratory model. We illustrate these points through an application of the method to the voting records of Labour Party MPs in the 1997-2001 session of the UK House of Commons.Governmen

Under the Influence? Intellectual Exchange in Political Science

We study the performance of political science journals in terms of their contribution to intellectual exchange in the discipline. Relying on the interplay of citation patterns, our method is simple, cheap, objective and captures the influence of journals in a meaningful way. We find that the American Political Science Review , World Politics and International Organization lead the field. In contrast to previous sub jective studies, we also find that economics is a key influence on political science, much more so than sociology.Governmen

Measuring and explaining political sophistication through textual complexity

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 dataset. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and re-scaled 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

The behaviour of political parties and MPs in the parliaments of the Weimar Republic

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Analysing the roll-call votes of the MPs of the Weimar Republic we find: (1) that party competition in the Weimar parliaments can be structured along two dimensions: an economic left–right and a pro-/anti-democratic. Remarkably, this is stable throughout the entire lifespan of the Republic and not just in the later years and despite the varying content of votes across the lifespan of the Republic, and (2) that nearly all parties were troubled by intra-party divisions, though, in particular, the national socialists and communists became homogeneous in the final years of the Republic.Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstan

Replication data for: US Treaty-making with American Indians

Native Americans are unique among domestic actors in that their relations with the United States government involve treaty-making, with almost 600 such documents signed between the Revolutionary War and the turn of the twentieth century. We investigate the effect of constitutional changes to the treating process in 1871, by which Congress stripped the President of his ability to negotiate directly with tribes. We construct a comprehensive new data set by digitizing all of the treaties for systematic textual analysis. Employing scaling techniques validated with word use information, we show that a single dimension characterizes the treaties as more or less ‘harsh’ in land and resource cession terms. We find that specific institutional changes to treaty making mechanisms had little effect on agreement outcomes. Rather it is the relative bargaining power of the United States economically and militarily that contributes to worsening terms for Indians over the nineteenth century

Eggers and Spirling -- Replication Data for: Incumbency Effects and the Strengths of Party Preferences: Evidence from Multiparty Elections in the UK

Replication materials include four R scripts and 11 datasets. Please consult the README carefully, because it contains information about directory pathways that is vital for replication

Replication Materials for: 'Democratization and Linguistic Complexity: The Effect of Franchise Extension on Parliamentary Discourse, 1832--1915'

Replication Materials for: 'Democratization and Linguistic Complexity: The Effect of Franchise Extension on Parliamentary Discourse, 1832--1915

The Shadow Cabinet in Westminster Systems: Modeling Opposition Agenda Setting in the House of Commons, 1832--1915

Code and Data to replicate all tables and figures in "The Shadow Cabinet in Westminster Systems: Modeling Opposition Agenda Setting in the House of Commons, 1832--1915" by Eggers and Spirlin