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...

It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate is helped in a state by having a governor of the same party. There is however little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design. The idea is that in very close elections the party of the...

The random assignment of judges in the US Appellate Courts has been underutilized in the study of court panel effects. The present study treats case assignment in the US Appellate Courts as a natural experiment, testing for panel effects of female judges in Title VII sex discrimination cases,...

The growing concern about economic inequality leads to a similar concern about political inequality. This article explores the seeming contradiction between the literature pointing to inequality in political representation in the United States and the literature showing that public policy does...

We simulate the results of tournaments in which legislators vie for the role of leader, who sets the legislative agenda to their liking. We show that with multiple dimensions, when all choices for leader are paired against each other, a Condorcet winner is more likely than not. The probability...

This paper presents a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that has made it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in U.S. House elections. The model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected...

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...