Jon Elster is engaged in the third year of research on a five-year project he is organizing on "Microfoundations of Civil War," funded by the Norwegian Research Council and carried out under the umbrella of the Center for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). This year the project presented a conference at Columbia University on "Civil War in Thucydides" and two conferences in Bogotá (Colombia) on various aspects of the settlement of civil wars. The research group expects funding for a second five-year period from 2007-2012, during which the focus of Professor Elster’s work will shift to "The Role of Religion in Civil Wars.”
Robert Erikson analyzed and published research supported by the National Science Foundation in “Likely (and Unlikely) Voters and the Assessment of Campaign Dynamics" in vol. 68 no. 4 of
Public Opinion Quarterly, 2004. The article demonstrates that Gallup's likely voter model exaggerates the degree of movement by voters during presidential campaigns. Much of the reported variation in candidate preference reported by Gallup in that election is not due to actual voter shifts in preference but rather to changes in the composition of Gallup’s likely voter pool. The findings highlight dangers of relying on samples of likely voters when polling well before Election Day.
Andrew Gelman conducted methodological work supported by the National Science Foundation to develop generalizations for multilevel models of several classical statistical concepts, including analysis of variance, predictive differences, R-squared, and prior distributions for variance parameters. In collaboration with Ph.D. candidates Joseph Bafumi, David Park and Boris Shor, Professor Gelman applied these methods to study the state-by-state relation between voting and income in Presidential elections, finding income to be an important predictor of vote choice in the poorer "red" states but not in the wealthier "blue" states.
In work funded by the National Institutes of Health, and in collaboration with Alexander van Geen of Lamont-Doherty Laboratory, Joseph Graziano of the School of Public Health, and Alexander Pfaff of the Columbia Earth Institute, among others, Professor Gelman performed decision analysis for the problem of arsenic in drinking water in Bangladesh villages, and evaluated the reliability of a commercial kit to test groundwater for arsenic in Bangladesh.
Shigeo Hirano, with James M. Snyder (MIT), J. Mark Hansen (University of Chicago) and Stephen Ansolabehere (MIT), has gathered and analyzed primary election data from 1900 until the present. Professor Hirano and James M. Snyder, Jr. have also written a paper examining why electoral support for third parties has declined during the twentieth century. Professor Hirano and Josh Clinton (Princeton) have been investigating why numerous estimates of the president's ideological position place him as more extreme than his party. Professor Hirano has completed several papers on the relationship between electoral politics and public expenditures in Japan.
Ira Katznelson, with John Lapinski and Rose Razaghian of Yale, is conducting a project titled “The Substance of Representation.” The project is completing a comprehensive dataset of congressional voting and lawmaking that includes coding the substance of every roll call vote in the House of Representatives and the Senate over the course of American history. The project's data is first being applied to understanding the role of the South in Congress between 1877 and 1965.
Robert Lieberman’s
Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective was published in August 2005 by Princeton University Press.
Kenneth Prewitt completed the manuscript of a book to be published by Russell-Sage, which analyzes the unexpectedly high level of public participation in the 2000 census despite growing concerns about privacy. The study demonstrates what happens when “civic obligation” and “privacy anxieties” confront each other in the public arena.
Robert Shapiro completed two books: one coauthored,
Public Opinion, Westview Press, 2004; and an edited volume,
The Meaning of Democracy, Academy of Political Science, 2005. He completed papers on two new collaborative research projects: "Partisan Polarization and Public Opinion in the United States" and "The Social and Political Attitudes of Soldiers and Officers in the U.S. Army."
Nadia Urbinati contracted with The University of Chicago Press for the publication of
Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogies. The book inquires into the conditions that make representation democratic. Professor Urbinati develops a theory of representative democracy as an original form of government characterized by advocacy and representativity that is not identical with electoral democracy or a second-best in relation to face-to-face democracy.
Professor Urbinati accepted editorship, with Alex Zakaras of Princeton, of
John Stuart Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Re-Assessment, a book scheduled for publication in winter 2006-07 to coincide with the Millian celebration year. Committed authors for the volume include Wendy Donner, Stephen Holmes, Glyn Morgan, Jonathan Riley, Fred Rosen, Alan Ryan, Dennis Thompson, Georgios Varouxakis, Jeremy Waldron, and Michael Walzer.
Professor Urbinati contracted with Rowman & Littlefield to co-edit with Andreas Kalyvas of The New School the first English edition of Hans Kelsen's,
The Essence and Value of Democracy and to write a monograph on Norberto Bobbio.
Professor Urbinati published “The Historian and the Ideologist” (a review essay of Quentin Skinner’s three volumes of
Visions of Politics) in
Political Theory; “Continuity and Rupture: Political Judgment in Democratic Representation,” in
Constellations; and “The Politics of Immigration” (a review of Seyla Benhabib’s
The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens) in
Dissent.
Gregory Wawro completed, with Eric Schickler of Harvard, a book manuscript,
Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate, which explains how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role—largely as a majoritarian body—during periods when it lacked formal rules governing debate that would seem essential for a legislature to function. The book also considers how changes in the larger institutional and political context—such as the expansion of the country and the move to direct election of senators—led to changes in Senate debate rules and investigates what impact these changes had on the functioning of the Senate. The book concludes with a discussion relating battles over obstruction in the Senate's past to recent conflicts over judicial nominations.
Professor Wawro completed, with Ida Pagter Kristensen of ERisk in New York, NY, “On the Robustness of Panel Corrected Standard Errors in Dynamic Specifications with Unobserved Heterogeneity.” The paper examines the performance of the method of panel corrected standard errors (PCSEs) for time-series cross-section data when a lag of the dependent variable is included as a regressor. The research conducted Monte Carlo studies to assess how problematic the lag specification is, and found that the method of PCSEs is robust unless the explanatory power of the unit effects is relatively large or there is correlation between unit effects and exogenous explanatory variables. A fixed effects estimator with robust standard errors does better in these situations and is generally recommended.
In another paper, “Analyzing Cross-Country Survey Data: Results from Monte Carlo Experiments,” co-authored with Ph.D. candidate Eduardo Leoni, Professor Wawro explored the performance of some multilevel estimators in order to provide guidance for substantive researchers confronted with the choice of models that have properties that may not be well understood. While preliminary, results of the research indicate that the bias introduced by incorrectly assuming independence between group-specific parameters and individual-level explanatory variables is trivial.
