It is commonly argued in the media that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this question we use a regression discontinuity design. The basic idea behind this is...

This paper tests coattail and balancing theories of midterm loss in congressional elections. Neither theory can by itself account for the regularity of midterm loss. But together they can. When, following a close presidential election, there are no coattails to withdraw, ideological balancing at...

We explore problems with the use of dyadic data in international relations. We illustrate these problems by analyzing a central proposition among IR scholars that democracies seek out other democracies as trading partners. Our main contribution is to present randomization tests to infer the...