Publications by Year: 2008

2008
Demographic Forecasting
Federico Girosi and Gary King. 2008. Demographic Forecasting. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Abstract

We introduce a new framework for forecasting age-sex-country-cause-specific mortality rates that incorporates considerably more information, and thus has the potential to forecast much better, than any existing approach. Mortality forecasts are used in a wide variety of academic fields, and for global and national health policy making, medical and pharmaceutical research, and social security and retirement planning.

As it turns out, the tools we developed in pursuit of this goal also have broader statistical implications, in addition to their use for forecasting mortality or other variables with similar statistical properties. First, our methods make it possible to include different explanatory variables in a time series regression for each cross-section, while still borrowing strength from one regression to improve the estimation of all. Second, we show that many existing Bayesian (hierarchical and spatial) models with explanatory variables use prior densities that incorrectly formalize prior knowledge. Many demographers and public health researchers have fortuitously avoided this problem so prevalent in other fields by using prior knowledge only as an ex post check on empirical results, but this approach excludes considerable information from their models. We show how to incorporate this demographic knowledge into a model in a statistically appropriate way. Finally, we develop a set of tools useful for developing models with Bayesian priors in the presence of partial prior ignorance. This approach also provides many of the attractive features claimed by the empirical Bayes approach, but fully within the standard Bayesian theory of inference.

The Effects of International Monetary Fund Loans on Health Outcomes
Megan Murray and Gary King. 2008. “The Effects of International Monetary Fund Loans on Health Outcomes.” PLoS Medicine, 5.Abstract
A "Perspective" article that discusses an article by David Stuckler and colleagues showing that, in Eastern European and former Soviet countries, participation in International Monetary Fund economic programs have been associated with higher mortality rates from tuberculosis.
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The Future of Partisan Symmetry as a Judicial Test for Partisan Gerrymandering after LULAC v. Perry
Bernard Grofman and Gary King. 2008. “The Future of Partisan Symmetry as a Judicial Test for Partisan Gerrymandering after LULAC v. Perry.” Election Law Journal, 6, 1, Pp. 2-35.Abstract

While the Supreme Court in Bandemer v. Davis found partisan gerrymandering to be justiciable, no challenged redistricting plan in the subsequent 20 years has been held unconstitutional on partisan grounds. Then, in Vieth v. Jubilerer, five justices concluded that some standard might be adopted in a future case, if a manageable rule could be found. When gerrymandering next came before the Court, in LULAC v. Perry, we along with our colleagues filed an Amicus Brief (King et al., 2005), proposing the test be based in part on the partisan symmetry standard. Although the issue was not resolved, our proposal was discussed and positively evaluated in three of the opinions, including the plurality judgment, and for the first time for any proposal the Court gave a clear indication that a future legal test for partisan gerrymandering will likely include partisan symmetry. A majority of Justices now appear to endorse the view that the measurement of partisan symmetry may be used in partisan gerrymandering claims as “a helpful (though certainly not talismanic) tool” (Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Breyer), provided one recognizes that “asymmetry alone is not a reliable measure of unconstitutional partisanship” and possibly that the standard would be applied only after at least one election has been held under the redistricting plan at issue (Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Souter and Ginsburg). We use this essay to respond to the request of Justices Souter and Ginsburg that “further attention … be devoted to the administrability of such a criterion at all levels of redistricting and its review.” Building on our previous scholarly work, our Amicus Brief, the observations of these five Justices, and a supporting consensus in the academic literature, we offer here a social science perspective on the conceptualization and measurement of partisan gerrymandering and the development of relevant legal rules based on what is effectively the Supreme Court’s open invitation to lower courts to revisit these issues in the light of LULAC v. Perry.

Brief PDF Article
How Not to Lie Without Statistics
Gary King and Eleanor Neff Powell. 2008. “How Not to Lie Without Statistics”.Abstract
We highlight, and suggest ways to avoid, a large number of common misunderstandings in the literature about best practices in qualitative research. We discuss these issues in four areas: theory and data, qualitative and quantitative strategies, causation and explanation, and selection bias. Some of the misunderstandings involve incendiary debates within our discipline that are readily resolved either directly or with results known in research areas that happen to be unknown to political scientists. Many of these misunderstandings can also be found in quantitative research, often with different names, and some of which can be fixed with reference to ideas better understood in the qualitative methods literature. Our goal is to improve the ability of quantitatively and qualitatively oriented scholars to enjoy the advantages of insights from both areas. Thus, throughout, we attempt to construct specific practical guidelines that can be used to improve actual qualitative research designs, not only the qualitative methods literatures that talk about them.
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Misunderstandings Among Experimentalists and Observationalists about Causal Inference
Kosuke Imai, Gary King, and Elizabeth Stuart. 2008. “Misunderstandings Among Experimentalists and Observationalists about Causal Inference.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 171, part 2, Pp. 481–502.Abstract

We attempt to clarify, and suggest how to avoid, several serious misunderstandings about and fallacies of causal inference in experimental and observational research. These issues concern some of the most basic advantages and disadvantages of each basic research design. Problems include improper use of hypothesis tests for covariate balance between the treated and control groups, and the consequences of using randomization, blocking before randomization, and matching after treatment assignment to achieve covariate balance. Applied researchers in a wide range of scientific disciplines seem to fall prey to one or more of these fallacies, and as a result make suboptimal design or analysis choices. To clarify these points, we derive a new four-part decomposition of the key estimation errors in making causal inferences. We then show how this decomposition can help scholars from different experimental and observational research traditions better understand each other’s inferential problems and attempted solutions.

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Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler
Gary King, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander Wagner. 2008. “Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler.” Journal of Economic History, 68, 4, Pp. 996.Abstract

The enormous Nazi voting literature rarely builds on modern statistical or economic research. By adding these approaches, we find that the most widely accepted existing theories of this era cannot distinguish the Weimar elections from almost any others in any country. Via a retrospective voting account, we show that voters most hurt by the depression, and most likely to oppose the government, fall into separate groups with divergent interests. This explains why some turned to the Nazis and others turned away. The consequences of Hitler's election were extraordinary, but the voting behavior that led to it was not.

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Toward A Common Framework for Statistical Analysis and Development
Kosuke Imai, Gary King, and Olivia Lau. 2008. “Toward A Common Framework for Statistical Analysis and Development.” Journal of Computational Graphics and Statistics, 17, Pp. 1–22.Abstract
We describe some progress toward a common framework for statistical analysis and software development built on and within the R language, including R’s numerous existing packages. The framework we have developed offers a simple unified structure and syntax that can encompass a large fraction of statistical procedures already implemented in R, without requiring any changes in existing approaches. We conjecture that it can be used to encompass and present simply a vast majority of existing statistical methods, regardless of the theory of inference on which they are based, notation with which they were developed, and programming syntax with which they have been implemented. This development enabled us, and should enable others, to design statistical software with a single, simple, and unified user interface that helps overcome the conflicting notation, syntax, jargon, and statistical methods existing across the methods subfields of numerous academic disciplines. The approach also enables one to build a graphical user interface that automatically includes any method encompassed within the framework. We hope that the result of this line of research will greatly reduce the time from the creation of a new statistical innovation to its widespread use by applied researchers whether or not they use or program in R.
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VA: Verbal Autopsies
Gary King and Ying Lu. 2008. “VA: Verbal Autopsies”.
Verbal Autopsy Methods with Multiple Causes of Death
Gary King and Ying Lu. 2008. “Verbal Autopsy Methods with Multiple Causes of Death.” Statistical Science, 23, Pp. 78–91.Abstract
Verbal autopsy procedures are widely used for estimating cause-specific mortality in areas without medical death certification. Data on symptoms reported by caregivers along with the cause of death are collected from a medical facility, and the cause-of-death distribution is estimated in the population where only symptom data are available. Current approaches analyze only one cause at a time, involve assumptions judged difficult or impossible to satisfy, and require expensive, time consuming, or unreliable physician reviews, expert algorithms, or parametric statistical models. By generalizing current approaches to analyze multiple causes, we show how most of the difficult assumptions underlying existing methods can be dropped. These generalizations also make physician review, expert algorithms, and parametric statistical assumptions unnecessary. With theoretical results, and empirical analyses in data from China and Tanzania, we illustrate the accuracy of this approach. While no method of analyzing verbal autopsy data, including the more computationally intensive approach offered here, can give accurate estimates in all circumstances, the procedure offered is conceptually simpler, less expensive, more general, as or more replicable, and easier to use in practice than existing approaches. We also show how our focus on estimating aggregate proportions, which are the quantities of primary interest in verbal autopsy studies, may also greatly reduce the assumptions necessary, and thus improve the performance of, many individual classifiers in this and other areas. As a companion to this paper, we also offer easy-to-use software that implements the methods discussed herein.
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