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.  

Publications

Political Cultures (With Lisa Blaydes) (Conditional Accept, Political Science Research & Methods)
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.   ​
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​
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

Working Papers

How To Make Causal Inferences Using Texts (With Naoki Egami, Christian Fong, Molly Roberts, and Brandon Stewart) (Revise and Resubmit)
A Women's Voice in the House: Gender Composition and Its Consequences in Committee Hearings (with Pamela Ban, Jaclyn Kaslovsky, and Emily West) (Under Review)
Causal Inference with Latent Treatments (with Christian Fong) (Under Review)
The Limited Effect of Presidential Public Appeals (with Annie Franco and Chloe Lim) Supplemental Appendix (Under Review)
Changing the Subject to Build an Audience: How Elected Officials Affect Constituent Communication (with Annie Franco and Monica Lee) (Revise and Resubmit, Political Communication)

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

​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)

The Downside of Deadlines (with Dan Carpenter).