The 2008 election: A preregistered replication analysis

We present an increasingly stringent set of replications of Ghitza & Gelman (2013), a multilevel regression and poststratification analysis of polls from the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign, focusing on a set of plots showing the estimated Republican vote share for whites and for all voters, as a function of income level in each of the states. We start with a nearly-exact duplication that uses the posted code and changes only the model-fitting algorithm; we then replicate using already-analyzed data from 2004; and finally we set up preregistered replications using two surveys from 2008 that we had not previously looked at. We have already learned from our preliminary, non-preregistered replication, which has revealed a potential problem with the published analysis of Ghitza & Gelman (2013); it appears that our model may not sufficiently account for nonsampling error, and that some of the patterns presented in that earlier paper may simply reflect noise. In addition to the substantive interest in validating earlier findings about demographics, geography, and voting, the present project serves as a demonstration of preregistration in a setting where the subject matter is historical (and thus the replication data exist before the preregistration plan is written) and where the analysis is exploratory (and thus a replication cannot be simply deemed successful or unsuccessful based on the statistical significance of some particular comparison).Comment: This article is a review and preregistration plan. It will be published, along with a new Section 5 describing the results of the preregistered analysis, in Statistics and Public Polic

Applying Large-Scale Data and Modern Statistical Methods to Classical Problems in American Politics

Exponential growth in data storage and computing capacity, alongside the development of new statistical methods, have facilitated powerful and flexible new research capabilities across a variety of disciplines. In each of these three essays, I use some new large-scale data source or advanced statistical method to address a well-known problem in the American Political Science literature. In the first essay, I build a generational model of presidential voting, in which long-term partisan presidential voting preferences are formed, in large part, through a weighted "running tally" of retrospective presidential evaluations, where weights are determined by the age in which the evaluation was made. By gathering hundreds of thousands of survey responses in combination with a new Bayesian model, I show that the political events of a voter's teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously influential, particularly among white voters. In the second and third essays, I leverage a national voter registration database, which contains records for over 190 million registered voters, alongside methods like multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) and coarsened exact matching (CEM) to address critical issues in public opinion research and in our understanding of the consequences of higher or lower turnout. In the process, I make numerous methodological and substantive contributions, including: building on the capabilities of MRP generally, describing methods for dealing with data of this size in the context of social science research, and characterizing mathematical limits of how turnout can impact election outcomes

Mixed partisan households and electoral participation in the United States.

Research suggests that partisans are increasingly avoiding members of the other party-in their choice of neighborhood, social network, even their spouse. Leveraging a national database of voter registration records, we analyze 18 million households in the U.S. We find that three in ten married couples have mismatched party affiliations. We observe the relationship between inter-party marriage and gender, age, and geography. We discuss how the findings bear on key questions of political behavior in the US. Then, we test whether mixed-partisan couples participate less actively in politics. We find that voter turnout is correlated with the party of one's spouse. A partisan who is married to a co-partisan is more likely to vote. This phenomenon is especially pronounced for partisans in closed primaries, elections in which non-partisan registered spouses are ineligible to participate

Replication data for: Deep Interactions with MRP: Election Turnout and Voting Patterns Among Small Electoral Subgroups

Using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP), we estimate voter turnout and vote choice within deeply interacted subgroups: subsets of the population that are defined by multiple demographic and geographic characteristics. This article lays out the models and statistical procedures we use, along with the steps required to fit the model for the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections. Though MRP is an increasingly popular method, we improve upon it in numerous ways: deeper levels of covariate interaction, allowing for non-linearity and non-monotonicity, accounting for unequal inclusion probabilities that are conveyed in survey weights, post-estimation adjustments to turnout and voting levels, and informative multidimensional graphical displays as a form of model checking. We use a series of examples to demonstrate the flexibility of our method, including an illustration of turnout and vote choice as subgroups become increasingly detailed, and an analysis of both vote choice changes and turnout changes from 2004 to 2008

Replication Data for: Voter Registration Databases and MRP: Toward the Use of Large Scale Databases in Public Opinion Research

Replication materials for "Voter Registration Databases and MRP" pape

The 2008 Election: A Preregistered Replication Analysis

<p>We present an increasingly stringent set of replications, a multilevel regression and poststratification analysis of polls from the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign, focusing on a set of plots showing the estimated Republican vote share for whites and for all voters, as a function of income level in each of the states.</p> <p> We start with a nearly exact duplication that uses the posted code and changes only the model-fitting algorithm; we then replicate using already-analyzed data from 2004; and finally we set up preregistered replications using two surveys from 2008 that we had not previously looked at. We have already learned from our preliminary, nonpreregistered replication, which has revealed a potential problem with the earlier published analysis; it appears that our model may not sufficiently account for nonsampling error, and that some of the patterns presented in that earlier article may simply reflect noise.</p> <p> In addition to the substantive interest in validating earlier findings about demographics, geography, and voting, the present project serves as a demonstration of preregistration in a setting where the subject matter is historical (and thus the replication data exist before the preregistration plan is written) and where the analysis is exploratory (and thus a replication cannot be simply deemed successful or unsuccessful based on the statistical significance of some particular comparison).</p> <p> Our replication analysis produced graphs that showed the same general pattern of income and voting as we had found in our earlier published work, but with some differences in particular states that we cannot easily explain and which seem too large to be explained by sampling variation. This process thus demonstrates how replication can raise concerns about an earlier published result.</p

Visual Memory Augmentation:

We present two early prototype systems that leverage computer memory to augment human memory in everyday situations. Both experiments investigate the role of eye tracking as a way to detect a person&apos;s attention and use this knowledge to affect short and long term memory processes. This work is part of a larger effort underway at the MIT Media Laboratory to develop systems that work symbiotically with humans, leading to increased performance along numerous cognitive and physical dimensions [9]