Presentations

This talk is based on this paper (in the current issue of the American Political Science Review), by Jen Pan, Molly Roberts, and me, along with a brief summary of our previous work (in Science here, and the American Poltiical Science Review ... Read more about Reverse Engineering Chinese Government Information Controls

This talk reports on the results of first large scale randomized news media experiment. We demonstrate that even small news media outlets can cause large numbers of Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly—all key components of democratic politics—more often than they would otherwise. After recruiting \(48\) mostly small media outlets, and working with them over \(5\) years, we chose groups of these outlets to write and publish articles on subjects we... Read more about How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas

We show how to use matching in causal inference to ameliorate model dependence -- where small, indefensible changes in model specification have large impacts on our conclusions. We introduce matching methods that are simpler, more powerful, and easier to understand than existing approaches. We also show that the most commonly used existing method, propensity score matching, should rarely be used in practice. Easy-to-use software is available to implement all methods discussed.

To prevent gerrymandering and to encourage a form of democratic representation, many state constitutions and judicial opinions require US legislative districts be "compact." Yet, few precise definitions are offered other than "you know it when you see it," effectively assuming the existence of a common understanding of the concept. In contrast, academics have concluded that the concept has multiple theoretical dimensions requiring large numbers of conflicting empirical measures. This has proved extremely challenging for courts tasked with adjudicating compactness. We hypothesize that both are... Read more about How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See it