Abstract Descriptive research—work aimed at answering “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions—is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description—through concepts, measures, or cas [...]
The scholarly exchange over approaches to measuring public preferences in the American states dates back several years. This introduction to the debate attempts to provide broad perspective on how scholars have conceptualized and measured poli [...]
Time-series cross-section (TSCS) data are prevalent in political science, yet many distinct challenges presented by TSCS data remain underaddressed. We focus on how dependence in both space and time complicates estimating either spatial or tem [...]
The external validity of causal findings is a focus of long-standing debates in the social sciences. Although the issue has been extensively studied at the conceptual level, in practice few empirical studies include an explicit analysis that i [...]
Valid inference in an observational study requires a correct control specification, but a correct specification is never known. I introduce a method that constructs a control vector from the observed data that, when included in a linear regres [...]
This article engages with Steven Lubet’s arguments in Interrogating Ethnography on reliability of evidence and replication of findings in ethnographic research. It draws on eight months of immersive fieldwork on Abkhaz mobilization in the Geor [...]
By the early 2000s, immersed in fieldwork methods literatures (participant-observer ethnography, interviewing, and document-based research), I increasingly saw that “evidence” meant something different in different research and professional pr [...]
While [ethnographers] do seek to uncover the rules of action, such rules are not as clearly discoverable as law is to lawyers – through examination of definitive statements. Most rules of social behavior are tacit and unstated. Frequently they [...]
Abstract The significance and influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions derive in large part from opinions’ roles as precedents for future opinions. A growing body of literature seeks to understand what drives the use of opinions as pr [...]
Abstract Political event data are widely used in studies of political violence. Recent years have seen notable advances in the automated coding of political event data from international news sources. Yet, the validity of machine-coded event d [...]
Abstract Recent efforts to improve attitudes toward outgroups and reduce support for extremists in violent settings report mixed results. Donors and aid organizations have spent millions of dollars to amplify the voices of moderate religious f [...]
Abstract To successfully address large-scale public health threats such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to limit feelings of fear that threaten social order and political stability. We study how policy responses to an infe [...]
Abstract: Speech and dialogue are the heart of politics: nearly every political institution in the world involves verbal communication. Yet vast literatures on political communication focus almost exclusively on what words were spoken, entirel [...]
Abstract: This article explores our experiences of conducting feminist interpretive research on the British Army Reserves. The project, which examined the everyday work-Army-life balance challenges that reservists face, and the roles of their [...]
Abstract: This article offers a description and discussion of “shadowing” as a data collection and analytic tool, highlighting potential research opportunities related to the direct observation of individuals—principally political elites—in th [...]
Abstract: Economics games such as the Dictator and Public Goods Games have been widely used to measure ethnic bias in political science and economics. Yet these tools may fail to measure bias as intended because they are vulnerable to self-pre [...]
Abstract: When working with grouped data, investigators may choose between “fixed effects” models (FE) with specialized (e.g., cluster-robust) standard errors, or “multilevel models” (MLMs) employing “random effects.” We review the claims give [...]
Abstract: Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are increasingly common in political science. They have many advantages, including a known and observable treatment assignment mechanism. The literature has emphasized the need for “falsification [...]
Abstract: Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine su [...]
Abstract: Canonical theories of opinion formation attribute an important role to affect. But how and for whom affect matters is theoretically underdeveloped. We establish the circumplex model in political science as a theory of core affect. In [...]
Abstract: Why do interest groups lobby allied legislators if they already agree? One possibility is that allies are intermediaries who help persuade unconvinced legislators. To study the role and value of intermediaries, I develop a formal mod [...]