RESEARCH PROJECTS

Please feel free to e-mail me to request the latest draft of all projects

 

PUBLICATIONS

Listening to the Coalition Merchants: Measuring the Intellectual Influence of Academic Scribblers
2007. The Forum: Vol. 5 : Iss. 3, Article 7.

Following Converse's advice that ideology is the product of a ``creative synthesis," conducted by a narrow group of intellectuals, this paper reports on attempts to study ideology at its point of creation. I develop a measure of ideology expressed among pundits, based on coded opinion pieces in magazines and newspapers from 1830 to 1990. I use this measure to test the impact of ideas on party coalitions. I argue that ideologies, as created by intellectuals, strongly influence the coalitions that party leaders advance. In three cases – the realignment on slavery before the Civil War, the Civil Rights realignment in the mid-20th century, and the party change on abortion more recently – there is evidence that intellectuals reorganize the issues before parties realign around them. This evidence suggests that the patterns of ``what goes with what" that intellectuals design have an impact on the nature of political cleavages.

The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform
with Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller
(University of Chicago Press 2008)

This paper argues that the Democratic and Republican parties have beaten back the reforms of the McGovern-Fraser commission and regained control of presidential nominations. Not only do parties effectively control outcomes; they are also capable of coordinated and strategic action in selecting nominees. The principal evidence for the study consists of data on the public endorsements of party leaders in the period of the so-called Invisible Primary, which is roughly the calendar year prior to the election. Parties are, to be sure, organizationally different than they were in the pre-reform period. They now operate as loose networks of office holders, activists, and other committed partisans, and exert power through influence or control over various scarce electoral resources, including funds, volunteers, credible cues, and expertise. Party resources convey to chosen candidates an edge that permits them to prevail in the primary and caucus phase of the process. Party support is not so great that no favored candidate could trip up and lose. But if candidates have been well chosen, they will not often fail -- and none has done so in the last two decades. Thus, in contrast to the wild nominations of the 1970s, the system of presidential primaries has become manageable for leaders of the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties.

Political Parties in Rough Weather
with Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller
The Forum. Vol.5, No.4, Article 3.

The Invisible Primary in Presidential Nominations, 1980-2004
with Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller
in The Making of the Presidential Candidates, 2008. William Mayer, ed. Rowman and Littlefield.

Pols or Polls? The Real Driving Force Behind Presidential Nominations
With Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller
Brookings Review. Summer 2003 Vol.21 No.3 pp. 36-39


DISSERTATION


The Coalition Merchants: How Ideologues Shape Parties in American Politics

 

SELECT WORKING PAPERS


The Coalition Merchants: Testing the Power of Ideas on the Civil Rights Movement.

Do ideas matter in party agendas? I test the proposition that the way that ideologies organize issues exerts an influence on the way that party leaders construct coalitions. Over the course of the 20th century, the Democratic and Republican parties have reversed positions on racial issues. This reversal is credited to a variety of factors, chief among them strategic decisions on the part of party leaders competing for votes. Using an original dataset of the opinions expressed by political thinkers in leading magazines and newspapers, I develop a measure of ideological positions parallel to NOMINATE scores for members of Congress. With this measure, I trace the transformation of ideological attitudes toward race. I show that the reversal of the Democrats and Republicans in congressional voting is preceded by a similar reversal, several decades earlier, of liberals and conservatives in the intellectual sphere.

 

Ideology, Party and the Creation of the Anti-Slavery Coalition
(This paper won the POP/Party Politics award for best paper at the APSA meeting 2005.)

How should we understand the relationship between ideology and party? Ideology may be thought of as a description of a party’s agenda, created to justify its electoral coalition. Or ideology may be created separately and pushed on party leaders, perhaps against their interests. Distinguishing these processes requires distinguishing purely ideological opinions from the partisan behavior of elected politicians. This paper develops such a model and applies it to the case of partisan change on slavery. Intellectuals in 1850 divided into two camps over slavery and the other major issues of the day at a time when slavery cross-cut the two parties in Congress. The ideological division matches one that develops in Congress a decade later, suggesting that the parties responded not just to electoral incentives, but also to this elite division. The ideology was accepted, even though it undermined longstanding attempts to hold together intersectional alliances.

 

Interpreting Ideal Points with Help from the Ideological Discourse.

• Dimensions of multidimensional scaling models have no natural interpretation.
• I merge data from outside Congress to help interpret the space inside Congress.
• Two not-quite-orthogonal dimensions seem to be ideology and party.
• Relationship of these dimensions changes over time.

Why Ideology? Political Philosophy Under the Influence of Psychology and Self-Interest

This paper offers a model of ideological formation that combines psychological predispositions and rational self-interest. I argue that by modeling the way in which political thinkers reason from first principles, and how they fail to ignore their own psychological and interest-based biases, we can explain ideological development. A model of long coalitions (Bawn 1999) provides a structure for people’s interests and their psychological traits, and a model of reason (Rawls 2001) provides a method of combing those interests and traits into an ideology.

Multinomial Ideal Point Estimation: When the Decision to Speak is as Important as What You Say

(Presented at PolMeth 2007)

This paper works with a theoretical model that implies the one way a person might manifest their ideology is through declining to take a position, and another way is through arguing with other co-ideologues. Thus the theoretical model implies an empirical model that allows abstention to serve as a third category. It also implies that taking the pro and con position on an issue may both be associated with the same ideological pole, while the other pole avoids the issue. I adapt an Item-Response Model to account for the case where abstention is a third category, not clearly between favoring and opposing a policy. The multinomial response lets any of these three responses: pro, con or abstain, be associated with either pole of a one-dimensional model. I apply this model to a dataset of pundits, and estimates tell a different story about the development of race as an ideological issue.

 

Family Squabbles? Cooperative Party Factions in American Politics
(With Gregory Koger and Seth Masket)

(Presented at the Bliss Institute's State of the Parties Conference 2005)

What are the primary factions within the Democratic and Republican parties, and to what extent do rival factions cooperate?  We address these questions using a unique dataset of information-sharing between party organizations, media outlets, 527s, and interest groups.  Using social network methods, we identify two major information-sharing clusters we label extended party networks; these networks correspond to a liberal/Democratic grouping and a conservative/Republican grouping.  We further identify factions within each party network, but we find a high degree of cooperation between party factions.  That is, our data suggest that beneath the intra-party disagreements we observe in primary elections and policy debates there is a subterranean pattern of organizational cooperation.


From George McGovern to John Kerry: State-level models of presidential primaries, 1972-2004
(With Marty Cohen and John Zaller)

(Presented at APSA 2003 and MPSA 2004)

After the 1968 Democratic convention, a series of reforms were put into practice for presidential nominations that fundamentally changed the way we nominate candidates for that office. Initial analysis of the process (see esp. Bartels 1982) suggested that dynamic factors such as momentum dominate the process. We apply a set of common models of both dynamic and static factors to all presidential primary contests since the McGovern-Fraser reforms. We attempt to detect momentum effects but also the effects of ideological positioning, money, media and elite endorsments. Our model also accounts for the multi-candidate nature of these races in ways that earlier work has not. We discover that the notion of momentum has changed considerably since Carter first demonstrated its impact, and that today it tends to favor the insider rather than helping unknowns leap to prominence.

 

Without a Watchdog: The Effect of Quality News Coverage on Congressional Polarization
(With Marty Cohen and John Zaller)

(Presented at APSA 2003, WPSA 2004, APSA 2004)

We consider the relationship between quality media coverage of members of Congress and the nature of representation. We find that were media coverage is of "high quality" (using a variety of measures), voters appear to exercise a delegate model of representation, in which MC's voting behavior closely maps constituent preferences. But where coverage is poor, voters may not have the information needed to hold MC's accountable, and those members operate under a responsible party government model, in which MC's voting behavior follows the party line. We test several implications of the mechanisms implied by this explanation of the empirical pattern.