Publications by Year: 1994

Designing Social Inquiry presents a unified approach to qualitative and quantitative research in political science, showing how the same logic of inference underlies both. This stimulating book discusses issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and the uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and getting the most out of qualitative research. It addresses topics such as interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. The book only uses mathematical notation to clarify concepts, and assumes no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics.

See the 2021 edition.

We demonstrate the surprising benefits of legislative redistricting (including partisan gerrymandering) for American representative democracy. In so doing, our analysis resolves two long-standing controversies in American politics. First, whereas some scholars believe that redistricting reduces electoral responsiveness by protecting incumbents, others, that the relationship is spurious, we demonstrate that both sides are wrong: redistricting increases responsiveness. Second, while some researchers believe that gerrymandering dramatically increases partisan bias and others deny this effect, we show both sides are in a sense correct. Gerrymandering biases electoral systems in favor of the party that controls the redistricting as compared to what would have happened if the other party controlled it, but any type of redistricting reduces partisan bias as compared to an electoral system without redistricting. Incorrect conclusions in both literatures resulted from misjudging the enormous uncertainties present during redistricting periods, making simplified assumptions about the redistricters’ goals, and using inferior statistical methods.

King, Alt, Burns, and Laver (1990) proposed and estimated a unified model in which cabinet durations depended on seven explanatory variables reflecting features of the cabinets and the bargaining environments in which they formed, along with a stochastic component in which the risk of a cabinet falling was treated as a constant across its tenure. Two recent research reports take issue with one aspect of this model. Warwick and Easton replicate the earlier findings for explanatory variables but claim that the stochastic risk should be seen as rising, and at a rate which varies, across the life of the cabinet. Bienen and van de Walle, using data on the duration of leaders, allege that random risk is falling. We continue in our goal of unifying this literature by providing further estimates with both cabinet and leader duration data that confirm the original explanatory variables’ effects, showing that leaders’ durations are affected by many of the same factors that affect the durability of the cabinets they lead, demonstrating that cabinets have stochastic risk of ending that is indeed constant across the theoretically most interesting range of durations, and suggesting that stochastic risk for leaders in countries with cabinet government is, if not constant, more likely to rise than fall.

We derive a unified statistical method with which one can produce substantially improved definitions and estimates of almost any feature of two-party electoral systems that can be defined based on district vote shares. Our single method enables one to calculate more efficient estimates, with more trustworthy assessments of their uncertainty, than each of the separate multifarious existing measures of partisan bias, electoral responsiveness, seats-votes curves, expected or predicted vote in each district in a legislature, the probability that a given party will win the seat in each district, the proportion of incumbents or others who will lose their seats, the proportion of women or minority candidates to be elected, the incumbency advantage and other causal effects, the likely effects on the electoral system and district votes of proposed electoral reforms, such as term limitations, campaign spending limits, and drawing majority-minority districts, and numerous others. To illustrate, we estimate the partisan bias and electoral responsiveness of the U.S. House of Representatives since 1900 and evaluate the fairness of competing redistricting plans for the 1992 Ohio state legislature.