Publications
How Policy Defection and Political Compromise Affect Ideological Perceptions of Representativeness
Forthcoming at Nationalism and Ethnic Politics
How do policy defection and compromise among member parties of coalition governments affect a voter’s ideological perceptions of their party? I argue that perceptions of representativeness, or congruence, of the party shift when the party participates in political compromise as voters observe the party’s performance as a member of a governing coalition. The causal mechanism operates through ideological updating: when voters learn about their party’s compromise, they update beliefs about where the party stands on the ideological spectrum, thereby changing how well they feel represented. I test this mechanism in the context of Italy using a pre/post vignette survey experiment examining subject perceptions and support of their party regarding asylum seeker policy. I find that individuals update their perceptions about the ideological positioning of their party after they learn about policy defection, and this effect is moderated—but not eliminated—when they simultaneously learn about political compromise. When compromising parties also defect from voter expectations, subjects report feeling less supportive of their party serving as a member of a governing coalition, feel less close to their party, and feel less represented. Together, these results clarify the causal mechanism linking political compromise to governing costs, with implications for understanding when and why coalition democracy becomes unstable.
Data and Code Availability in Political Science Publications from 1995 to 2022
PS: Political Science & Politics 58 (2), 339-345
In this paper, we assess the availability of reproduction archives in political science. By “reproduction archive,” we mean the data and code supporting quantitative research articles that allows others to reproduce the computations described in the published paper. We collect a random sample of quantitative research articles published in political science from 1995 to 2022. We find that — even in 2022 — most quantitative research articles do not point a reproduction archive. However, practices are improving. In 2014, when the DA-RT symposium was published in PS, about 12% of quantitative research articles point to the data and code. Eight years later, in 2022, that has increased to 31%. This underscores a massive shift in norms, requirements, and infrastructure. Still, only a minority of articles share the supporting data and code. In 2014, Lupia and Alter wrote: “Today, information on the data production and analytic decisions that underlie many published works in political science is unavailable.” They could write the same today; much work remains to be done.
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The Dissent Score: Using Events Data to Measure Dissent
Forthcoming at the Journal of Peace Research
Researchers commonly use measures of dissent or protest in their analyses. Yet a standardized, public, ready-to-use measure does not exist. In this paper, we introduce such a measure—what we call the “dissent score.” To create the dissent score, we follow the standard practice in the literature and use the number of dissent events reported in events data sets. However, we make two improvements. First, we adjust for variation in media scrutiny by using the rate of dissent events—the number of dissent events compared to the total number of events reported in the data set. Second, we use a hierarchical model to partially pool these rates within and across countries to reduce measurement error in places with few events. We supply the country-year dissent score in an easy-to-use format, but also describe our method and supply the computer code so that researchers can extend our method, make adjustments, compute the dissent score for alternative place-times, or apply the idea to new concepts.
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Link to Dissent Scores Project website
The Data Availability Policies of Political Science Journals
Forthcoming at Scientific Data
This paper describes the data availability policies posted on the websites of a broad collection of political science journals. We code the policies of 221 political science journals, and we find that only 20% of these journals require researchers to share their data and/or code as a condition of publication. While requirements to share data and code are common among the most visible political science journals, these policies remain relatively rare in the discipline more broadly. In prioritizing reforms to improve openness and reproducibility in political science, we suggest remaining mindful of the relative rarity and simple effectiveness of requiring authors to share their data and code.
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Working Papers
Government-Party Evaluations and the Cost of Governing for Far-Right Parties
Executive-serving parties typically experience a “cost of governing” — support attrition following a party’s service as a member of a governing coalition. Not all parties experience these costs equally; the far-right experiencing higher governing costs than other parties. Theories that attempt to explain this discrepancy assume that far-right voters more harshly evaluate their government and party when it serves in the executive than other party supporters. I challenge this conventional wisdom using data from nine waves of the European Social Survey (ESS). I show that on average, far-right party supporters are dissatisfied with government and feel less close to their party while in opposition, but become more satisfied and more attached to their party than most other party supporters once they enter the executive. The far-right’s high governing costs are inversely related to evaluations of the government and party attachment, confronting our beliefs on how parties incur governing costs.
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