Syllabi
This document contains syllabi for Pursuing Experimental Methods(PEM, also called 과학으로서의정치학회 in Korean), which consists of graduate students at Sogang University interested in experimental methods in political science. PEM runs two study groups per semester which focus on design and replication, respectively. Design Study aims for members to learn how to translate a conceptual model into an experimental design and to develop their own research design in the end. Replication Study aims for participants to learn how to deal with real data to which textbook methods might not apply.
2019 FW (Preliminary) 
Replication Study
GitHub repository: https://github.com/sgpolitics/replication/tree/2019FW
on Regression Discontinuity Design
Step 0: Learn Git and GitHub
- Tutorial
[in Korean]: https://sgpolitics.github.io/PEM/tutorial
Step 1: w/o RD Software Packages, i.e., manual way
-
Broockman, David E. 2009. “Do Congressional Candidates Have Reverse Coattails? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design.” Political Analysis 17(4): 418-434.
[Abstract] [Article] [ISPS Data Archive] [Harvard Dataverse]
Although the presidential coattail effect has been an object of frequent study, the question of whether popular congressional candidates boost vote shares in return for their parties’ presidential candidates remains unexplored. This article investigates whether so-called “reverse coattails” exist using a regression discontinuity design with congressional district-level data from presidential elections between 1952 and 2004. Taking incumbency to be near-randomly distributed in cases where congressional candidates have just won or lost their previous elections, I find that the numerous substantial advantages of congressional incumbency have no effect on presidential returns for these incumbents’ parties. This null finding underscores my claim that the existing coattail literature deserves greater scrutiny. My results also prompt a rethinking of the nature of the advantages that incumbents bring to their campaigns and may help deepen our understanding of partisanship in the United States.
-
Broockman, David E. 2014. “Do female politicians empower women to vote or run for office? A regression discontinuity approach.” Electoral Studies 34: 109-204.
Persistent gender gaps in political officeholding and mass political participation jeopardize women’s equal representation in government. This paper brings new evidence to the longstanding hypotheses that the presence of additional female candidates and officeholders helps address these gaps by empowering other women to vote or run for office themselves. With a regression discontinuity approach and data on 3813 US state legislative elections where a woman opposed a man, I find that the election of additional women in competitive US state legislative elections has no discernible causal effects on other women’s political participation at the mass or elite levels. These estimates are precise enough to rule out even substantively small effects. These results stand in stark contrast to a number of findings from India, suggesting that although electing the first women in a society can have these empowering effects, remaining barriers to women’s inclusion in American democracy go beyond what further increases in female officeholding can themselves erode.
-
(optional) Kim, Sung Eun and Johannes Urpelainen. 2017. “The Polarization of American Environmental Policy: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Senate and House Votes, 1971–2013.” Review of Policy Research 34(4): 456-484.
The partisan polarization of environmental policy is an important development in American politics, but it remains unclear how much such polarization reflects voter preferences, as opposed to disagreements between partisan elites. We conduct a regression discontinuity analysis of all major environmental and energy votes in the Senate and the House, 1971–2013. In total, we have 368,974 individual roll call votes by senators and House Representatives. The causal effect of electing a Democrat instead of a Republican in close elections on pro‐environmental voting is large: when a Democrat wins, pro‐environmental voting increases by over 40 percentage points. Because of the quasi‐experimental research design, this difference cannot be attributed to the median voter’s preferences. Next, we test hypotheses concerning possible explanations for the elite partisan conflict. The Democrat–Republican gap is the widest when fossil fuel interests make contributions exclusively to Republicans and when state‐level public opinion is polarized.
-
(optional) Garcia, Ryan J. B. 2015. “National Service and Civic Engagement: A Natural Experiment.” Political Behavior 37(4): 845–864.
Nearly all studies that seek to uncover the effects of military service on the individual are plagued with the self-selection bias that comes with studying the all-volunteer force. To solve this problem, this paper takes advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the suspension of the French National Service program to produce unbiased causal analyses of the effect of national service on a range of civic engagement measures. Results generated using Instrumental Variables estimation indicate that there is little difference in individual-level civic engagement between service participants and their non-serving peers. However, when potential mediators are taken into account, the ensuing results imply that the substantial increase in the likelihood of having children associated with national service participation has a suppressive effect on service participants’ overall level of civic engagement.
Step 2: w/ RD Software Packages
-
Cattaneo, Matias D., Rocío Titiunik and Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare. forthcoming. “The Regression Discontinuity Design.” Luigi Curini and Robert Franzese, eds. Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
-
Klašnja, Marko and Rocío Titiunik. 2017. “The Incumbency Curse: Weak Parties, Term Limits, and Unfulfilled Accountability.” American Political Science Review 111(1): 129-148.
We study how representation works in a context where accountability to voters is restricted because of term limits and accountability to parties is limited because of party weakness. Analyzing all Brazilian mayoral elections between 1996 and 2012 using a regression discontinuity design, we show that becoming the incumbent party results in large subsequent electoral losses. We theorize that the presence of term limits, combined with political parties to which politicians are only weakly attached, affects the incentives and behavior of individual politicians in such a way that their parties’ suffer systematic losses. A descriptive analysis of an original dataset on the career paths of Brazilian mayors suggests that our assumptions are an accurate description of Brazil’s political context, and we find support for three central empirical implications of our theoretical explanation. Moreover, based on an analysis of additional data from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia, we show that the negative effects found in Brazil also exist in other democracies.
-
-
(optional) Holbein, John and Marcos Rangel. forthcoming. “Does Voting Have Upstream and Downstream Consequences? Regression Discontinuity Tests of the Transformative Voting Hypothesis.” The Journal of Politics.
Voting is a central pillar of political science research; indeed, scholars have long addressed questions like, “who votes?”, “why do people vote?”, and “what interventions increase voting?” However, only a few have considered whether voting changes adjacent civic dispositions and behaviors. In this paper, we explore the effects of voting shocks on young citizens’ political interest, memberships, social awareness, and political knowledge in the lead up to the voting experience (“upstream”) and in the months and years after (“downstream”). To do so, we use a unique combination of large survey data from two countries paired with an exact date-of-birth regression discontinuity design. We find that eligibility to voluntary vote and exposure to compulsory voting—despite eliciting large turnout increases—have precisely-estimated null effects on young people’s upstream or downstream civic engagement. While voting may be an important experience, it may have smaller transformative effects than previously thought.
-
(optional) Song, B. K. 2018. “Estimating Incumbency Effects Using Regression Discontinuity Design.” Research & Politics 5(4).
In recent years, research on the incumbency effect using a regression discontinuity design has flourished. Although the regression discontinuity design has allowed scholars to examine the incumbency effect in various electoral settings, previous studies have not measured what has traditionally been defined as the incumbency (dis)advantage. In this paper, I bring together methods from previous research, provide a consistent exposition thereof, and highlight some of the challenges of estimation and interpretation by applying these methods to election data from 10 different electoral settings.
Step 3: w/o Stata code
-
Kim, Jeong Hyun. 2019. “Direct Democracy and Women’s Political Engagement.” American Journal of Political Science 63(3): 594-610.
[R-only]What are the conditions that promote gender equality in political participation? In this article, I propose that the presence of direct democracy expands gender equality in political participation by signaling the system’s openness to women’s voice, confirming their political competency, and highlighting their stake in political decisions. To test this argument, I leverage a quasi‐experiment in Sweden in the aftermath of the introduction of universal suffrage, where the type of municipal political institutions was determined by a population threshold. My findings lend strong support to the effect of direct democracy on the political inclusion of women. I find that the gender gap in electoral participation was smaller in municipalities using direct democracy than in similarly sized municipalities that only had representative institutions.
(optional) Appendix 1: Geographic Regression Discontinuity
-
Spenkuch, Jörg L. and David Toniatti. 2018. “Political Advertising and Election Results.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133(4): 1981-2036.
We study the persuasive effects of political advertising. Our empirical strategy exploits FCC regulations that result in plausibly exogenous variation in the number of impressions across the borders of neighboring counties. Applying this approach to detailed data on television advertisement broadcasts and viewership patterns during the 2004–12 presidential campaigns, our results indicate that total political advertising has almost no impact on aggregate turnout. By contrast, we find a positive and economically meaningful effect of advertising on candidates’ vote shares. Taken at face value, our estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in the partisan difference in advertising raises the partisan difference in vote shares by about 0.5 percentage points. Evidence from a regression discontinuity design suggests that advertising affects election results by altering the partisan composition of the electorate.
-
Keele, Luke J. and Rocío Titiunik. 2015. “Geographic Boundaries as Regression Discontinuities.” Political Analysis 23(1): 127-155.
[R-only]Political scientists often turn to natural experiments to draw causal inferences with observational data. Recently, the regression discontinuity design (RD) has become a popular type of natural experiment due to its relatively weak assumptions. We study a special type of regression discontinuity design where the discontinuity in treatment assignment is geographic. In this design, which we call the Geographic Regression Discontinuity (GRD) design, a geographic or administrative boundary splits units into treated and control areas, and analysts make the case that the division into treated and control areas occurs in an as-if random fashion. We show how this design is equivalent to a standard RD with two running variables, but we also clarify several methodological differences that arise in geographical contexts. We also offer a method for estimation of geographically located treatment effects that can also be used to validate the identification assumptions using observable pretreatment characteristics. We illustrate our methodological framework with a re-examination of the effects of political advertisements on voter turnout during a presidential campaign, exploiting the exogenous variation in the volume of presidential ads that is created by media market boundaries.
-
Keele, Luke and Rocío Titiunik. 2016. “Natural Experiments Based on Geography.” Political Science Research and Methods 4(1): 65-95.
[R-only]Political scientists often attempt to exploit natural experiments to estimate causal effects. We explore how variation in geography can be exploited as a natural experiment and review several assumptions under which geographic natural experiments yield valid causal estimates. In particular, we focus on cases where a geographic or administrative boundary splits units into treated and control areas. The different identification assumptions we consider suggest testable implications, which we use to establish their plausibility. Our methods are illustrated with an original study of whether ballot initiatives increase turnout in Wisconsin and Ohio, which illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of causal inferences based on geographic natural experiments.
(optional) Appendix 2: Methodological Caveats
-
Cuesta, Brandon de la and Kosuke Imai. 2016. “Misunderstandings About the Regression Discontinuity Design in the Study of Close Elections.” Annual Review of Political Science 19:375-396.
[R-only]Recently, the regression discontinuity (RD) design has become increasingly popular among social scientists. One prominent application is the study of close elections. We explicate several methodological misunderstandings widespread across disciplines by revisiting the controversy concerning the validity of RD design when applied to close elections. Although many researchers invoke the local or as-if-random assumption near the threshold, it is more stringent than the required continuity assumption. We show that this seemingly subtle point determines the appropriateness of various statistical methods and changes our understanding of how sorting invalidates the design. When multiple-testing problems are also addressed, we find that evidence for sorting in US House elections is substantially weaker and highly dependent on estimation methods. Finally, we caution that despite the temptation to improve the external validity, the extrapolation of RD estimates away from the threshold sacrifices the design’s advantage in internal validity.
-
Snyder, James M., Olle Folke and Shigeo Hirano. 2015. “Partisan Imbalance in Regression Discontinuity Studies Based on Electoral Thresholds.” Political Science Research and Methods 3(2): 169-186.
Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case ends up above or below the threshold and also directly affects the dependent variable of interest. This article shows that imbalance in RDDs exploiting close elections are likely to arise even in the absence of any type of strategic sorting. Imbalance may arise simply due to variation in the underlying distribution of partisanship in the electorate across constituencies. Using both simulated and actual election data, the study demonstrates that the imbalances driven by partisanship can be large in practice. It then shows that although this causes a bias for the most naive RDDs, the problem can be corrected with commonly used RDDs such as the inclusion of a local linear control function.
-
Eggers, Andrew C., Anthony Fowler, Jens Hainmueller, Andrew B. Hall and James M. Snyder Jr. 2015. “On The Validity Of The Regression Discontinuity Design For Estimating Electoral Effects: New Evidence From Over 40,000 Close Races.” American Journal of Political Science 59(1): 259-274.
The regression discontinuity (RD) design is a valuable tool for identifying electoral effects, but this design is only effective when relevant actors do not have precise control over election results. Several recent papers contend that such precise control is possible in large elections, pointing out that the incumbent party is more likely to win very close elections in the United States House of Representatives in recent periods. In this article, we examine whether similar patterns occur in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S. and national or local elections in nine other countries. No other case exhibits this pattern. We also cast doubt on suggested explanations for incumbent success in close House races. We conclude that the assumptions behind the RD design are likely to be met in a wide variety of electoral settings and offer a set of best practices for RD researchers going forward.
-
Caughey, Devin and Jasjeet S. Sekhon. 2011. “Elections and the Regression Discontinuity Design: Lessons from Close U.S. House Races, 1942–2008.” Political Analysis 19(4): 385-408.
[R-only]Following David Lee’s pioneering work, numerous scholars have applied the regression discontinuity (RD) design to popular elections. Contrary to the assumptions of RD, however, we show that bare winners and bare losers in U.S. House elections (1942–2008) differ markedly on pretreatment covariates. Bare winners possess large ex ante financial, experience, and incumbency advantages over their opponents and are usually the candidates predicted to win by Congressional Quarterly’s pre-election ratings. Covariate imbalance actually worsens in the closest House elections. National partisan tides help explain these patterns. Previous works have missed this imbalance because they rely excessively on model-based extrapolation. We present evidence suggesting that sorting in close House elections is due mainly to activities on or before Election Day rather than postelection recounts or other manipulation. The sorting is so strong that it is impossible to achieve covariate balance between matched treated and control observations, making covariate adjustment a dubious enterprise. Although RD is problematic for postwar House elections, this example does highlight the design’s advantages over alternatives: RD’s assumptions are clear and weaker than model-based alternatives, and their implications are empirically testable.
2020 SS
Design Study
on Public Opinion
Session 1: 4/3
-
Aarøe, Lene, Michael Bang Petersen and Kevin Arceneaux. 2017. “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration.” American Political Science Review 117(2): 277-294.
[Abstract] [Article]
We present, test, and extend a theoretical framework that connects disgust, a powerful basic human emotion, to political attitudes through psychological mechanisms designed to protect humans from disease. These mechanisms work outside of conscious awareness, and in modern environments, they can motivate individuals to avoid intergroup contact by opposing immigration. We report a meta-analysis of previous tests in the psychological sciences and conduct, for the first time, a series of tests in nationally representative samples collected in the United States and Denmark that integrate the role of disgust and the behavioral immune system into established models of emotional processing and political attitude formation. In doing so, we offer an explanation for why peaceful integration and interaction between ethnic majority and minorities is so hard to achieve.
-
Klar, Samara. 2018. “When Common Identities Decrease Trust: An Experimental Study of Partisan Women.” American Journal of Political Science 62: 610-622.
[Abstract] [Article]
How does sharing a common gender identity affect the relationship between Democratic and Republican women? Social psychological work suggests that common ingroup identities unite competing factions. After closely examining the conditions upon which the common ingroup identity model depends, I argue that opposing partisans who share the superordinate identity of being a woman will not reduce their intergroup biases. Instead, I predict that raising the salience of their gender will increase cross‐party biases. I support my hypotheses with a nationally representative survey of 3,000 adult women and two survey experiments, each with over 1,000 adult women. These findings have direct implications for how women evaluate one another in contentious political settings and, more broadly, for our understanding of when we can and cannot rely upon common identities to bridge the partisan divide.
Session 2: 4/17
-
Druckman, James N., Erik Peterson and Rune Slothuus. 2013. “How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation.” American Political Science Review 107(1): 57-79
[Abstract] [Article]
Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: The parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps more fundamental questions: Has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place and, if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.
-
Tomz, Michael R. and Jessica L. P. Weeks. 2013. “Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace.” American Political Science Review 107(4): 849-865.
[Abstract] [Article]
One of the most striking findings in political science is the democratic peace: the absence of war between democracies. Some authors attempt to explain this phenomenon by highlighting the role of public opinion. They observe that democratic leaders are beholden to voters and argue that voters oppose war because of its human and financial costs. This logic predicts that democracies should behave peacefully in general, but history shows that democracies avoid war primarily in their relations with other democracies. In this article we investigate not whether democratic publics are averse to war in general, but whether they are especially reluctant to fight other democracies. We embedded experiments in public opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom and found that individuals are substantially less supportive of military strikes against democracies than against otherwise identical autocracies. Moreover, our experiments suggest that shared democracy pacifies the public primarily by changing perceptions of threat and morality, not by raising expectations of costs or failure. These findings shed light on a debate of enduring importance to scholars and policy makers.
Session 3: 5/1
-
Grose, Christian R., Neil Malhotra and Robert Parks Van Houweling. 2015. “Explaining Explanations: How Legislators Explain their Policy Positions and How Citizens React.” American Journal of Political Science 59(3): 724-743.
[Abstract] [Article]
Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators’ explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within‐subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between‐subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to their audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support—especially among people who disagree with the legislators’ roll‐call positions.
-
Groenendyk, Eric. 2019. “Of Two Minds, But One Heart: A Good “Gut” Feeling Moderates the Effect of Ambivalence on Attitude Formation and Turnout.” American Journal of Political Science 63(2): 368-384
[Abstract] [Article]
Popular psychological accounts argue that successful candidates address their appeals to citizens’ “hearts” rather than their “heads.” Yet research on campaigns shows that candidates win elections by getting voters to think about particular issues—especially issues that create ambivalence in the minds of opposition supporters. This article helps to reconcile these “heart‐centered” and “head‐centered” accounts of preference formation during campaigns. An original experiment and ANES data analyses (1980–2004) show that a “good gut feeling” toward a candidate helps citizens to overcome the paralyzing effect of ambivalence on attitude formation and turnout. And, since turnout is most tenuous among those with lower income, this is where the effect is most pronounced. Since Democratic candidates rely disproportionately on support from these lower‐income voters, it is particularly important that they inspire positive affect among latent supporters.
Session 4: 5/15
-
Kim, Hyeon Jeong and Sang Hee Park. 2015. “The Effects of Priming Incidental Emotions on System Justification.” Korean Journal Of Social And Personality Psychology 29(3): 111-127.
[in Korean][Abstract] [Article]
People are motivated to rationalize the world and the system that they live in (Jost & Banaji, 1994), and those with higher levels of this system justification motive are less likely to support social change. Meanwhile, primed emotions unrelated to a given target can influence perceptions and judgments involving that target (Lerner & Keltner, 2000). Therefore it is possible that primed emotions unrelated to the system affect the degree of system justification, and in turn change the willingness to protest against the system. To test this, we had participants watch a short video clip to induce one of four emotions (anger, sadness, happiness, and fear), and measured system justification as well as the willingness to protest against the status quo. As predicted, anger-induced participants justified the system less than those who were primed with fear or happiness. Although the direct effect of emotion priming on the willingness to protest was not significant, the indirect effect through system justification was. The result confirms that incidental emotions can influence how people construe the reality and the motivation to change it.
-
Zhao, Yangzi & Michelle Io-Low. 2019. “Authoritarians’ Economic Preferences: Check Your Pocket Book or Follow the Norm.” Working Paper.
[Abstract]
The lack of support for redistributive policy to alleviate increasing inequality observed in many societies sparked the interests of pundits and scholars to explore what underlies people’s preferences on economic policies. As socio-demographic variables fail to explain one’s stance on economic issues, the present study tackles this question by examining the interplay between authoritarianism, as an individual level disposition, and redistributive norms at the societal level. Given that conforming to established norms and following authority’s guide characterize authoritarianism, we hypothesize that the economic preference of people who score high on this scale echoes the nature of the redistributive norm of a society. Our cross-national analysis confirms this hypothesis. To better illustrate the casual mechanism, we also conducted a survey experiment.
Replication Study
Due to COVID-19, there was no seminar during summer vacation.
