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Professor
of
Politics
Ph.D. 1981, Liverpool; M.A. 1972, Essex; BA (Hons) 1970, Essex.
Email:
Phone:
(212) 998-8534
Office Address:
NYU Department of Politics, 19 W. 4th Street, New York, NY 10012
Office Room Number:
409
For a full list of my work, see my
Vita.
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Areas of Research/Interest: Analytical, computational and empirical accounts of political competition and decision-making.
Select Publications:
Working Papers:
Theoretical work in progress
-
Party competition: an agent-based model (with
Ernest Sergenti). A book-length manuscript developing an agent based spatial
model of party competition and dealing, among other things, with: the
interaction of different decision rules deployed by different agents; multimodal
distributions of citizens’ ideal points; non-policy “valence” effects on party
competition; the endogenous emergence of new political parties; the evolutionary
stability of combinations of decision rules; the evolution of new decision
rules; endogenous citizen preferences; rigorous characterization of the output
of computational models.
- Rigorously
characterizing output from computational models of party competition
(with Ernest Sergenti). We distinguish between using
agent-based models (ABMs) as (a) discovery tools (b) computational responses to
analytical intractability. We work towards a set of methodological standards for
the computational analysis of ABMs, while maintaining a substantive focus on an
aspect of party competition – the extent to which the presence of unresponsive
“sticker” party at one extreme of the policy spectrum results in outcomes where
more responsive parties also adopt more extreme policy positions. We find the
effect on other parties of an intransigent party is greatest with moderately
polarized bimodal voter densities, especially when one mode of the distribution
of voter ideal points is smaller than the other.
Empirical work in progress
-
Dublin citizens'
jury. (with Damien French). APSR conference paper.
Reports
results from a citizens’ jury experiment in Dublin; analyzes treatment effects
by selecting jury and control group from the Irish election study panel, with
pre and post deliberation questionnaires to jurors supplemented by panel surveys
on the issues deliberated, both before jury selection and nine months after.
Highlights impact of “framing” effects on jury deliberation.
Estimating
party policy positions with uncertainty, based on manifesto codings. (with Kenneth
Benoit and Slava Mikhaylov). APSA conference paper.
In order to elaborate spatial models
of party competition models empirically, we need reliable and valid
measurements of agents’ positions on salient policy dimensions. The primary
empirical times series of estimated party positions in many countries derives
from the content analysis of party manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto
Project (CMP). Despite widespread use of the CMP data, the level of error in
the CMP estimates has never been estimated or even fully characterized. We
remedy this situation, characterizing some of the error processes involved in
generating CMP data, then using bootstrapped analyses of coded quasi-sentences
to simulate these. Using our estimates of these errors, we demonstrate ways to
correct otherwise biased inferences derived from statistical analyses of CMP
data.
Coder reliability and misclassification in Comparative Manifesto Project codings (with Slava Mikhaylov and Kenneth Benoit)
Forthcoming papers
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