Estimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Votes

Estimating Ideal Points from Votes and Text

We introduce a framework for combining vote data and text data within a single formal and statistical framework. Formally, we model vote choice and word choice in terms of a common set of underlying preference parameters. Statistically, we implement a method for recovering these preference and location parameters. The method estimates the number of underlying ideological dimensions, models zero...

The Relationship between Seats and Votes in Two-Party Systems

Estimating the effects of activists in two-party and multi-party systems: comparing the United States and Israel

This article presents an electoral model where activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties. These resources are then used by the party candidates to enhance the electoral perception of their quality or valence. We construct an empirical model of the United States presidential election of 2008 and employ the electoral perception of the character traits of the two candidates. We...

Estimating party policy positions: Comparing expert surveys and hand-coded content analysis

In this paper we compare estimates of the left-right positions of political parties derived from an expert survey recently completed by the authors with those derived by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) from the content analysis of party manifestos. Having briefly described the expert survey, we first explore the substantive policy content of left and right in the expert survey estimate...

Estimating Intertemporal Preferences

In this article, we show how the degree of risk aversion, discounting, and preference for intertemporal substitution for a natural resource manager can be structurally estimated within a recursive utility framework. We focus on the management of a reservoir in California, and test the data for consistency with a recursive utility model specification versus standard time-additive separability. T...