Books

Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters Cambridge University Press, 2013
  • Awarded the 2014 Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book in legislative studies published in 2013.
  • Subject of roundtable at Southern Political Science Association, 2015.
  • Reviewed in: Congress & Presidency 

The Impression of Influence: Legislator Communication, Representation, and Democratic Accountability  With Sean Westwood and Solomon Messing.  Princeton University Press, 2014.  ​
Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences With Margaret E. Roberts and Brandon Stewart. Princeton University Press, 2022.
Working Papers
The Effects of Shifting Priorities and Capacity on Policy Work and Constituency Service: Evidence from a Census of Legislator Requests to U.S. Federal Agencies (with Devin Judge-Lord and Eleanor Powell) (Under Review)
Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes (with Will Marble and Cole Tanigawa-Lau) (Revise and Resubmit)  
  • ​Previous draft circulated as "Who Put Trump in the White House? Explaining the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Trump's Victory (With Will Marble)"
Assessing the Reliability of Probabilistic US Presidential Election Forecasts May Take Decades (with Dean Knox and Sean Westwood) (Under Review) 
Naïve regression requires weaker assumptions than factor models to adjust for multiple cause confounding (With Dean Knox and Brandon Stewart) (Journal of Machine Learning Research, Revise and Resubmit​)
Comment on ‘Simple tests for the extent of vote fraud with absentee and provisional ballots in the 2020 US presidential election’​ (with Andrew C. Eggers) 

Publications

How To Make Causal Inferences Using Texts (With Naoki Egami, Christian Fong, Molly Roberts, and Brandon Stewart) Forthcoming, Science Advances. 
Reply to Kalmoe and Mason: The pitfalls of using surveys to measure low-prevalence attitudes and behavior (with Sean Westwood, Matt Tyler, and Clayton Nall) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022
Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond (with Amir Feder, Katherine A. Keith, Emaad Manzoor, Reid Pryzant, Dhanya Sridhar, Zach Wood-Doughty, Jacob Eisenstein, Roi Reichart, Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Victor Veitch, Diyi Yang) Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Forthcoming. ​ 
Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence (with Sean Westwood, Matt Tyler, and Clayton Nall) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022
Causal Inference with Latent Treatments (with Christian Fong)  American Journal of Political Science, 2022​ Supplementary Information
Partisan Enclaves and Information Bazaars: Mapping Selective Exposure to Online News (with Matt Tyler and Shanto Iyengar) Journal of Politics, 2022 Supplementary Information
How Does the Rising Number of Women in the U.S. Congress Change Deliberation? Evidence from House Committee Hearings (with Pamela Ban, Jaclyn Kaslovsky, and Emily West) Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2022
The Durable Differential Deterrent Effects of Strict Photo Identification Laws (with Jesse Yoder) Political Science Research & Methods, 2022
No Evidence for Systematic Voter Fraud: A Guide To Statistical Claims About the 2020 Election (with Andrew C. Eggers and Haritz Garro) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021 Replication Archive
Machine Learning for Social Science: An Agnostic Approach (with Margaret E. Roberts and Brandon Stewart) Annual Review of Political Science, 2021
Political Cultures (With Lisa Blaydes) Political Science Research & Methods, 2020
Obstacles  to estimating voter ID laws' effect on turnout (With Eitan Hersh, Marc Meredith, Jonathan Mummolo, and Clayton Nall) Journal of Politics, 2018. 80 (3) Replication Code Supplemental Appendix

Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds (with Lisa Blaydes and Alison McQueen) Journal of Politics, 2018 80 (4) ​Supplemental Appendix Replication Code

Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and the Effects of Heterogeneous Treatments with Ensemble Methods (With Solomon Messing and Sean J. Westwood)  Political Analysis, 2017. 25(4) 413-434​ Supplemental Appendix Replication Code
Discovery of Treatments from Text Corpora (with Christian Fong)  In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany​
Money in Exile: Campaign Contributions and Committee Access (with Eleanor Neff Powell) Journal of Politics, 2016. 78(4). 974-988 Supplemental Appendix Replication Code
Measuring Representational Style in the House: The Tea Party, Obama and Legislators' Changing Expressed Priorities in Data Analytics in Social Science, Government, and Industry Edited Volume from Cambridge University Press. 2016.   ​
TopicCheck: Interactive Alignment for Assessing Topic Model Stability with Jason Chuang, Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart, Rebecca Weiss, Dustin Tingley, Justin Grimmer, and Jeffrey Heer. North America Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT).  2015.  
We're All Social Scientists Now: How Big Data, Machine Learning, and Causal Inference Work Together PS: Political Science & Politics, 2015. 48(1), 80-83​
Computer-Assisted Content Analysis: Topic Models for Exploring Multiple Subjective Interpretations. with Jason Chuang, John D. Wilkerson, Rebecca Weiss, Dustin Tingley, Brandon M. Stewart, Margaret E. Roberts, Forough Poursabzi-Sagdeh, Justin Grimmer, Leah Findlater, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Jeffrey Heer.  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Human-Propelled Machine Learning.  2014.  
Congressmen in Exile: The Politics and Consequences of Involuntary Committee Removal (with Eleanor Neff Powell) The Journal of Politics, 2013. 75(4), 907-920.  ​Supplementary Information Replication Code
Appropriators Not Position Takers: The Distorting Effects of Electoral Incentives on Congressional Representation American Journal of Political Science, 2013.  57 (3), 624-642 Supplementary Information Replication Code

Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts (with Brandon Stewart) Political Analysis, 2013. 21 (3), 267--297

  • ​Awarded Political Analysis Editor's Choice Award for an article providing an especially significant contribution to political methodology.
Elevated Threat-Levels and Decreased Expectations: How Democracy Handles Terrorist Threats (with Tabitha Bonilla) Poetics, 2013. 41, 650--669 (Special Issue on Topic Models in Social Science) 

Evaluating Model Performance in Fictitious Prediction Problems.  Discussion of ``Multinomial Inverse Regression for Text Analysis" by Matthew Taddy.  Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2013.108 (503) 770-771

How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation (with Solomon Messing and Sean Westwood) American Political Science Review, 2012. 106 (4), 703-719. Supplementary Information Replication Code

General Purpose Computer-Assisted Clustering and Conceptualization (With Gary King)  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011.  108(7), 2643-2650.

An Introduction to Bayesian Inference via Variational Approximations Political Analysis, 2011. 19 (1) 32-47 Supplemental Notes

Approval Regulation and Endogenous Provision of Confidence: Theory and Analogies to Licensing, Safety, and Financial Regulation (with Dan Carpenter and Eric Lomazoff)  Regulation and Governance, 2010. 4(4) 383-407

A Bayesian Hierarchical Topic Model for Political Texts: Measuring Expressed Agendas in Senate Press Releases  Political Analysis, 2010. 18(1) 1-35.

  • Awarded 2010 Robert H Durr Award for the best paper presented at 2009 Midwest Political Science Association meeting applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem.
  • Awarded 2011 Warren Miller Prize for the best paper published in Political Analysis in 2010.
  • Included in Political Analysis virtual issue on Bayesian methods in Political Science
  • Supplemental Notes

Papers, Memos, and Other Public Writing on Election Administration

No Evidence Placer County Elections are Manipulated

High Correlations Between Predicted and Actual Ballots Do Not Imply Fraud (with Matt Tyler)

Amicus Brief in Holmes, et. al. v Moore, et al. (North Carolina Supreme Court Voter Identification Case)

Changing the Default: The Impact of Motor-Voter Reform in Colorado (with Jonathan Rodden)

Evaluating Look Ahead America’s ‘The Georgia Report’ On Illegal, Out-Of-State Voting In The 2020 Election (with Andrew Hall and Dan Thompson

Book Reviews and Other Writing

Review of Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President​ Public Opinion Quarterly. 2019. 83, 1. 
Graduate School is 1/3 George Strait, 1/3 Kanye West, and 1/3 Paula Radcliffe 

Dormant Working Papers

The Limited Effect of Presidential Public Appeals (with Annie Franco and Chloe Lim) Supplemental Appendix
Changing the Subject to Build an Audience: How Elected Officials Affect Constituent Communication (with Annie Franco and Monica Lee) 

Creating and Destroying Party Brands (With Craig Goodman, David Parker, and Frances Zlotnick)

The Downside of Deadlines (with Dan Carpenter).  

​Are Close Elections Random? (With Brian Feinstein, Eitan Hersh, and Dan Carpenter) Supplementary Information
A Class of Bayesian Semiparametric Cluster-Topic Models for Political Texts (with Rachel Shorey, Hanna Wallach, and Frances Zlotnik)