Daniel Carpenter, the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and chair of the Department of Government, has published a research article titled Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance, which reveals the secret world of lobbying government regulators. First published by Cambridge University Press and then the journal Perspectives on Politics, the study –…
Persecuted Minorities and Defensive Cooperation: Contributions to Public Goods by Hindus and Muslims in Delhi
Melani Cammett Faculty, Comparative Politics How does intergroup inequality, specifically minority experiences of persecution, affect contributions to local public goods? Based on an original survey experiment and qualitative research in slums in Delhi, we examine how Hindus and Muslims respond to social norms around promoting cooperation on community sanitation. Mainstream theories of development predict greater…
Complementarity and Public Views on Overlapping Domestic and International Courts (with Kelebogile Zvobgo)
Stephen Chaudoin Faculty, International Relations Overview: Can international organizations (IOs) turn the tide of resistance to their authority? We consider a class of IOs bound by the complementarity principle: they only act when domestic institutions fail. IOs like the International Criminal Court (ICC) have placed great faith in complementarity as an argument to rally support…
The Election Effect: Democratic Leaders in Inter-group Conflict (with Sarah Hummel and Yon Soo Park)
Stephen Chaudoin Faculty, International Relations Overview: Many interactions between countries depend on choices made by democratically selected leaders. We argue that the experience of being elected alters subsequent leader behavior at the international level, a phenomenon we call the election effect. Specifically, democratic election intensifies in-group identification and generates a sense of obligation to voters,…
If a Statistical Model Predicts That Common Events Should Occur Only Once in 10,000 Elections, Maybe it’s the Wrong Model
Gary King Faculty, Methods and Formal Theory Overview: Election surprises are hardly surprising. Unexpected challengers, deaths, retirements, scandals, campaign strategies, real world events, and heresthetical maneuvers all conspire to confuse the best models. Quantitative researchers usually model district-level elections with linear functions of measured covariates, to account for systematic variation, and normal error terms, to…
Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project
Kosuke Imai Faculty, Methods and Formal Theory Overview: Together with two graduate students – Christopher Kenny and Tyler Simko – as well as an alumni of this department – Shiro Kuriwaki at Yale University, we developed a simulation algorithm and used it to detect gerrymandering. Our algorithm was discussed by supreme court justices in one…
Measuring the Partisan Behavior of U.S. Newspapers, 1880 to 1980
James SnyderFaculty, American Politics Overview: In this project—joint with Shigeo Hirano at Columbia University—we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage and commentary of partisan activities, institutions and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes…