Presentations

Is Survey Instability Due to Respondents who Don't Understand Politics or Researchers Who Don't Understand Respondents? (Caltech), at California Institute of Technology, Wednesday, March 13, 2024:
For over 75 years, survey researchers have observed disturbingly large proportions of respondents changing answers when asked the same question again later, even if no material changes have taken place. This “survey instability” is central to substantive debates in many scholarly fields and, more generally, for choosing the data generation process underlying all survey data analysis methods. By building on developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and statistical measurement, we construct an encompassing model of the survey response, narrow competing hypotheses to a single data... Read more about Is Survey Instability Due to Respondents who Don't Understand Politics or Researchers Who Don't Understand Respondents? (Caltech)
How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (UCLA), at UCLA, Tuesday, March 12, 2024:
An essential component of democracy is the ability to hold legislators accountable via the threat of electoral defeat, a concept that has rarely been quantified directly. Well known massive changes over time in indirect measures -- such as incumbency advantage, electoral margins, partisan bias, partisan advantage, split ticket voting, and others -- all seem to imply wide swings in electoral accountability. In contrast, we show that the (precisely calibrated) probability of defeating incumbent US House members has been surprisingly constant and remarkably high for two-thirds of a century. We... Read more about How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (UCLA)
Correcting Measurement Error Bias in Conjoint Survey Experiments (Harvard Experiments Working Group), at Harvard Experiments Working Group, Friday, February 9, 2024:
Conjoint survey designs are spreading across the social sciences due to their unusual capacity to estimate many causal effects from a single randomized experiment. Unfortunately, by their ability to mirror complicated real-world choices, these designs often generate substantial measurement error and thus bias. We replicate both the data collection and analysis from eight prominent conjoint studies, all of which closely reproduce published results, and show that a large proportion of observed variation in answers to conjoint questions is effectively random noise. We then discover a common... Read more about Correcting Measurement Error Bias in Conjoint Survey Experiments (Harvard Experiments Working Group)
How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See it (Harvard Law School), at Harvard Law School, Friday, January 26, 2024:

To deter gerrymandering, many state constitutions require legislative districts to be "compact." Yet, the law offers few precise definitions other than "you know it when you see it," which effectively implies a common understanding of the concept. In contrast, academics have shown that compactness has multiple dimensions and have generated many conflicting measures. We hypothesize that both are correct -- that compactness is complex and multidimensional, but a common understanding exists across people. We develop a survey to elicit this understanding, with high reliability (in data where...

Read more about How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See it (Harvard Law School)
How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (Washington University in St. Louis), at Washington University in St. Louis, Tuesday, December 5, 2023:

An essential component of democracy is the ability to hold legislators accountable via the threat of electoral defeat, a concept that has rarely been quantified directly. Well known massive changes over time in indirect measures --- such as incumbency advantage, electoral margins, partisan bias, partisan advantage, split ticket voting, and others --- all seem to imply wide swings in electoral accountability. In contrast, we show that the (precisely calibrated) probability of defeating incumbent US House members has been surprisingly constant and remarkably high for two-thirds of a...

Read more about How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (Washington University in St. Louis)
Statistically Valid Inferences from Privacy Protected Data (Washington University in St. Louis), at Washington University in St. Louis, Monday, December 4, 2023:

Venerable procedures for privacy protection and data sharing within academia, companies, and governments, and between sectors, have been proven to be completely inadequate (e.g., respondents in de-identified surveys can usually be re-identified). At the same time, unprecedented quantities of data that could help social scientists understand and ameliorate the challenges of human society are presently locked away inside companies, governments, and other organizations, in part because of worries about privacy violations. We address these problems with a general-...

Read more about Statistically Valid Inferences from Privacy Protected Data (Washington University in St. Louis)
How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University), at Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University, Wednesday, November 29, 2023:

An essential component of democracy is the ability to hold legislators accountable via the threat of electoral defeat, a concept that has rarely been quantified directly. Well known massive changes over time in indirect measures --- such as incumbency advantage, electoral margins, partisan bias, partisan advantage, split ticket voting, and others --- all seem to imply wide swings in electoral accountability. In contrast, we show that the (precisely calibrated) probability of defeating incumbent US House members has been surprisingly constant and remarkably high for two-thirds of a...

Read more about How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University)
How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (Nuffield College, Oxford University), at Nuffield College, Oxford University, Friday, November 24, 2023:

An essential component of democracy is the ability to hold legislators accountable via the threat of electoral defeat, a concept that has rarely been quantified directly. Well known massive changes over time in indirect measures --- such as incumbency advantage, electoral margins, partisan bias, partisan advantage, split ticket voting, and others --- all seem to imply wide swings in electoral accountability. In contrast, we show that the (precisely calibrated) probability of defeating incumbent US House members has been surprisingly constant and remarkably high for two-thirds of a...

Read more about How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (Nuffield College, Oxford University)
How Science Works, and Some Advice (for you and for me) (Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University), at Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, Friday, November 24, 2023:
A brief introduction to a Q&A session on advice about succeeding in and after graduate school. All advice follows from a book I'm writing, tentatively called The Social Science of Science (with Casey Petroff) and a course I am planning ("The Hidden Curriculum," see GaryKing.org/Gov2001), both of which we'll also discuss. Read more about How Science Works, and Some Advice (for you and for me) (Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University)

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