Book Chapters

King, Gary, and Langche Zeng. "Inference in Case Control Studies." In Encyclopedia of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, edited by Shein-Chung Chow. 3rd ed. New York: Marcel Dekker, 2010. AbstractArticle
Classic (or "cumulative") case-control sampling designs do not admit inferences about quantities of interest other than risk ratios, and then only by making the rare events assumption. Probabilities, risk differences, and other quantities cannot be computed without knowledge of the population incidence fraction. Similarly, density (or "risk set") case-control sampling designs do not allow inferences about quantities other than the rate ratio. Rates, rate differences, cumulative rates, risks, and other quantities cannot be estimated unless auxiliary information about the underlying cohort such as the number of controls in each full risk set is available. Most scholars who have considered the issue recommend reporting more than just the relative risks and rates, but auxiliary population information needed to do this is not usually available. We address this problem by developing methods that allow valid inferences about all relevant quantities of interest from either type of case-control study when completely ignorant of or only partially knowledgeable about relevant auxiliary population information. This is a somewhat revised and extended version of Gary King and Langche Zeng. 2002. "Estimating Risk and Rate Levels, Ratios, and Differences in Case-Control Studies," Statistics in Medicine, 21: 1409-1427. You may also be interested in our related work in other fields, such as in international relations, Gary King and Langche Zeng. "Explaining Rare Events in International Relations," International Organization, 55, 3 (Spring, 2001): 693-715, and in political methodology, Gary King and Langche Zeng, "Logistic Regression in Rare Events Data," Political Analysis, Vol. 9, No. 2, (Spring, 2001): Pp. 137--63.
King, Gary. "The Changing Evidence Base of Social Science Research." In The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives, edited by Gary King, Kay Schlozman and Norman Nie. New York: Routledge Press, 2009. AbstractChapter PDF
This (two-page) article argues that the evidence base of political science and the related social sciences are beginning an underappreciated but historic change.
King, Gary, Ori Rosen, and Martin Tanner. "The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics." In Ecological Inference, edited by Larry Blume and Steven N. Durlauf. 2nd ed., 2006. Abstract
Dictionary entry on the definition of "ecological inference," and a brief summary of the history of ecological inference research.
Epstein, Lee, Daniel E. Ho, Gary King, and Jeffrey A. Segal. "The Effect of War on the Supreme Court." In Principles and Practice in American Politics: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Samuel Kernell and Steven S. Smith. 3rd ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2006. AbstractArticle
Does the U.S. Supreme Court curtail rights and liberties when the nation’s security is under threat? In hundreds of articles and books, and with renewed fervor since September 11, 2001, members of the legal community have warred over this question. Yet, not a single large-scale, quantitative study exists on the subject. Using the best data available on the causes and outcomes of every civil rights and liberties case decided by the Supreme Court over the past six decades and employing methods chosen and tuned especially for this problem, our analyses demonstrate that when crises threaten the nation’s security, the justices are substantially more likely to curtail rights and liberties than when peace prevails. Yet paradoxically, and in contradiction to virtually every theory of crisis jurisprudence, war appears to affect only cases that are unrelated to the war. For these cases, the effect of war and other international crises is so substantial, persistent, and consistent that it may surprise even those commentators who long have argued that the Court rallies around the flag in times of crisis. On the other hand, we find no evidence that cases most directly related to the war are affected. We attempt to explain this seemingly paradoxical evidence with one unifying conjecture: Instead of balancing rights and security in high stakes cases directly related to the war, the Justices retreat to ensuring the institutional checks of the democratic branches. Since rights-oriented and process-oriented dimensions seem to operate in different domains and at different times, and often suggest different outcomes, the predictive factors that work for cases unrelated to the war fail for cases related to the war. If this conjecture is correct, federal judges should consider giving less weight to legal principles outside of wartime but established during wartime, and attorneys should see it as their responsibility to distinguish cases along these lines.
King, Gary, and Langche Zeng. "Inference in Case-Control Studies." In Encyclopedia of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, edited by Shein-Chung Chow. 2nd ed. New York: Marcel Dekker, 2004. AbstractArticle
Classic (or "cumulative") case-control sampling designs do not admit inferences about quantities of interest other than risk ratios, and then only by making the rare events assumption. Probabilities, risk differences, and other quantities cannot be computed without knowledge of the population incidence fraction. Similarly, density (or "risk set") case-control sampling designs do not allow inferences about quantities other than the rate ratio. Rates, rate differences, cumulative rates, risks, and other quantities cannot be estimated unless auxiliary information about the underlying cohort such as the number of controls in each full risk set is available. Most scholars who have considered the issue recommend reporting more than just the relative risks and rates, but auxiliary population information needed to do this is not usually available. We address this problem by developing methods that allow valid inferences about all relevant quantities of interest from either type of case-control study when completely ignorant of or only partially knowledgeable about relevant auxiliary population information.
Gelman, Andrew, Jonathan Katz, and Gary King. "Empirically Evaluating the Electoral College." In Rethinking the Vote: The Politics and Prospects of American Electoral Reform, edited by Ann N. Crigler, Marion R. Just and Edward J. McCaffery, 75-88. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. AbstractChapter PDF
The 2000 U.S. presidential election rekindled interest in possible electoral reform. While most of the popular and academic accounts focused on balloting irregularities in Florida, such as the now infamous "butterfly" ballot and mishandled absentee ballots, some also noted that this election marked only the fourth time in history that the candidate with a plurality of the popular vote did not also win the Electoral College. This "anti-democratic" outcome has fueled desire for reform or even outright elimination of the electoral college. We show that after appropriate statistical analysis of the available historical electoral data, there is little basis to argue for reforming the Electoral College. We first show that while the Electoral College may once have been biased against the Democrats, the current distribution of voters advantages neither party. Further, the electoral vote will differ from the popular vote only when the average vote shares of the two major candidates are extremely close to 50 percent. As for individual voting power, we show that while there has been much temporal variation in relative voting power over the last several decades, the voting power of individual citizens would not likely increase under a popular vote system of electing the president.
King, Gary, Ori Rosen, and Martin Tanner. "Information in Ecological Inference: An Introduction." In Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies, edited by Gary King, Ori Rosen and Martin Tanner. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Chapter PDF
Gakidou, Emmanuela, and Gary King. "Determinants of Inequality in Child Survival: Results from 39 Countries." In Health Systems Performance Assessment: Debates, Methods and Empiricism, edited by Chrisopher Murray and David B. Evans, 497-502. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003.
Gill, Jeff, and Gary King. "Numerical Issues Involved in Inverting Hessian Matrices." In Numerical Issues in Statistical Computing for the Social Scientist, edited by Micah Altman, Jeff Gill and Michael P. McDonald, 143-176. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2003.Chapter PDF
King, Gary, John Bruce, and Andrew Gelman. "Racial Fairness in Legislative Redistricting." In Classifying by Race, edited by Paul E. Peterson. Princeton University Press, 1996. AbstractChapter PDF
In this chapter, we study standards of racial fairness in legislative redistricting- a field that has been the subject of considerable legislation, jurisprudence, and advocacy, but very little serious academic scholarship. We attempt to elucidate how basic concepts about "color-blind" societies, and similar normative preferences, can generate specific practical standards for racial fairness in representation and redistricting. We also provide the normative and theoretical foundations on which concepts such as proportional representation rest, in order to give existing preferences of many in the literature a firmer analytical foundation.
Gelman, Andrew, and Gary King. "Advantages of Conflictual Redistricting." In Fixing the Boundary: Defining and Redefining Single-Member Electoral Districts, edited by Iain McLean and David Butler, 207-218. Aldershot, England: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1996. AbstractChapter PDF
This article describes the results of an analysis we did of state legislative elections in the United States, where each state is required to redraw the boundaries of its state legislative districts every ten years. In the United States, redistrictings are sometimes controlled by the Democrats, sometimes by the Republicans, and sometimes by bipartisan committees, but never by neutral boundary commissions. Our goal was to study the consequences of redistricting and at the conclusion of this article, we discuss how our findings might be relevant to British elections.
Gelman, Andrew, and Gary King. "Party Competition and Media Messages in U.S. Presidential Election Campaigns." In The Parties Respond: Changes in the American Party System, edited by Sandy L. Maisel, 255-295. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. AbstractArticle
At one point during the 1988 campaign, Michael Dukakis was ahead in the public opinion polls by 17 percentage points, but he eventually lost the election by 8 percent. Walter Mondale was ahead in the polls by 4 percent during the 1984 campaign but lost the election in a landslide. During June and July of 1992, Clinton, Bush, and Perot each had turns in the public opinion poll lead. What explains all this poll variation? Why do so many citizens change their minds so quickly about presidential choices?
King, Gary. "The Methodology of Presidential Research." In Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches, edited by George Edwards III, Bert A. Rockman and John H. Kessel, 387-412. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1993. AbstractChapter PDF
The original purpose of the paper this chapter was based on was to use the Presidency Research Conference’s first-round papers– by John H. Aldrich, Erwin C. Hargrove, Karen M. Hult, Paul Light, and Richard Rose– as my "data." My given task was to analyze the literature ably reviewed by these authors and report what political methodology might have to say about presidency research. I focus in this chapter on the traditional presidency literature, emphasizing research on the president and the office. For the most part, I do not consider research on presidential selection, election, and voting behavior, which has been much more similar to other fields in American politics.