Three essays in political methodology

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Three essays in political methodology "
Arthur Peter Andrew Spirling C. Signorino

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	54875
Doc. No	:	TL24829
Call number	:	‭3314700‬
Main Entry	:	Arthur Peter Andrew Spirling
Title & Author	:	Three essays in political methodology\ Arthur Peter Andrew Spirling
College	:	University of Rochester
Date	:	2008
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2008
Page No	:	135
Abstract	:	This political methodology dissertation consists of several distinct essays that apply three new estimation techniques to all three subfields of the discipline—international relations, American politics and Comparative politics. The first is an application of reversible jump Markov chain monte carlo, a more general form of MCMC popular for model search problems in statistics. We apply RJMCMC to the current Iraq conflict in order to identify change points in terms of civilian casualty numbers. The second chapter uses the Bradley-Terry model for pairwise contests to estimate the 'power' of actors in legislatures. We apply this generalized linear model to the United States Senate. We use both an unstructured and covariate based model to show that, inter alia senators' party identification, ideological tendency, leadership rank, service length and gender all affect their ability to influence others in the chamber. The third chapter shows that British Members of Parliament's voting decisions on roll calls can affect their constituency performance at election time. In particular, 'rebeling' on government bills apparently hurts them, while voting independently on less important matters tends to benefit them. We use a non-parametric, random forest algorithm to estimate the relationship, since the number of parameters (the number of roll calls) far exceeds the number of observations (constituency performances) to be predicted.
Subject	:	Social sciences; Pure sciences; Bayesian; Change points; Generalized linear models; Nonparametric; Political methodology; Statistics; Political science; 0463:Statistics; 0615:Political science
Added Entry	:	C. Signorino
Added Entry	:	University of Rochester