Jeffrey Byron Lewis

Preprints

Ballot Formats, Touchscreens, and Undervotes: A Study of the 2006 Midterm Elections in Florida. Election Law Journal (with Laurin Frisana, Michael C. Herron, James Honaker, forthcoming)

poLCA: An R Package for Polytomous Variable Latent Class Analysis. Journal of Statistical Software (with Drew A. Linzer, forthcoming)

Scaling Roll Call Votes with wnominate in R. Journal of Statistical Software (with Keith Poole, James Lo, and Royce Carroll, forthcoming)

Reprints

Ideological Adaptation? The Survival Instinct of Threatened Legislators. Journal of Politics 2007. 69(3):828-843 (with Thad Kousser and Seth Masket)

Did Ralph Nader Spoil a Gore Presidency? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election. Quarterly Journal of Political Science. 2007 2(3):205-226 (with Michael Herron).

An Estimate of Risk Aversion in the U.S. Electorate. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 2007. 2(2):139-154 (with Adam Berinsky)

Return to Normalcy? Revisiting the Effects of Term Limits on Incumbency Advantage and Spending in California Assembly Elections. State Politics and Policy Quarterly Spring 2007. 7(1):20-38 (with Seth Masket).

Learning about Learning: A Response to Wand. Political Analysis. 2006, 14:121-129 (with Kenneth Schultz).

Estimating Regression Models in Which the Dependent Variable Is Based on Estimates Political Analysis. 2005, 13(4) (with Drew Linzer)

Beyond the Median: Voter Preferences, District Heterogeneity, and Representation." Journal of Political Economy. 2004, 106(6):1364--1383 (with Liz Gerber)

Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap. Political Analysis. Spring 2004. 12:105--127 (with Keith Poole)

Extending King's Ecological Inference Model to Multiple Elections using Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Chapter in Gary King, Ori Rosen, and Martin Tanner, Eds. Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004 (page proofs linked)

Revealing Preferences: Empirical Estimation of a Crisis Bargaining Game with Incomplete Information. Political Analysis. 2003, 11(4):345--365 (with Kenneth Schultz).

Understanding King's Ecological Inference Model: A Method-of-moments Approach, Historical Methods. 2001, 34(4):172--188.

Estimating Voter Preference Distributions from Individual-Level Voting Data. Political Analysis. 2001, 9(3):275-297.

No Evidence on Directional vs. Proximity Voting Political Analysis. 1999, 8(1):21-33 (with Gary King).

Comment on McCue, K. F. (2001), `The Statistical Foundations of the EI method. The American Statistician. 2002, 55(3):250.

Working papers

From Punchcards to Touchscreens: Some Evidence from Pasco County, Florida on the Effects of Changing Voting Technolog (with Michael C. Herron)

Estimating State Preferences in International Crises: Promise and Limitations in Fully Structural Models (with Kenneth A. Schultz)

• WNOMINATE for R: This R package implements Poole and Rosenthal's classic roll call scaling technique in a new and much easier to use environment. The package is built on the original Fortran code (Poole's NOM9707.FOR). Turning your favorite roll call voting dataset into the standard idealpoint and cutline graphs from Poole's Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting is now only a few quick commands away. This package is distributed through CRAN. Documentation in PDF form can be found here. Written with Keith Poole and James Lo (Version 0.92, October 2006).
• poLCA: A software package for the estimation of latent class models and latent class regression models for polytomous outcome variables, implemented in the R statistical computing environment. The homepage for this project can be found here. This package is distributed through CRAN. Written with Drew Linzer (Version 0.9, July 2006).
• inflat: A Stata function to estimate the interest group rating deflator described in Groseclose, Levitt, and Synder (APSR 1999). Download the program file (inflat6.do) here. Brief documentation can be found in the program file.

• SMSGameServer: Software for holding real-time in-class tournaments. Students are presented with a simple game such as a prisoner's dilemma, ultimatum, or centipede game (view screenshot). They participate in the tournament by sending SMS text messages from their mobile phones (strategies can also be submitted from the web console, view screenshot). Results of the tournament are presented by player and strategy in a web browser in a manner suitable for presentation through a data projector (view screenshot). The initial distribution of strategies can then be "evolved" using standard evolutionary game theory techniques allowing students to see the evolutionary fitness of their chosen strategies (view screenshots: (1) early in the evolution, (2) after more iterations. (3) in the long run ). The software is extensible allowing for easy programming of additional games. Requires a Nokia cell phone and a USB cable for receiving the SMS messages (cheaply available on Ebay) (Version 0.1, Python source available soon).

More soon...

Major collections

110th US Congress roll call votes download: Download contemporaneous roll call voting data in standard form.

California Assembly and Senate rollcall voting data, 1993 to the present: Download recent California roll call voting data in an easy to use form.

Spring 2008

Political Science 200E: Advanced Quantitative Methods. The 5th course in our PhD quantitative methods sequence. A course wiki can be found here (Non-UCLA community members may sign up for access here).

Political Science 172: Strategy and Conflict. Intermediate-level undergraduate game theory course focusing on applications in international crisis bargaining. Webpage for this course can be found here.

Winter 2008

Political Science 200b: Introduction to probability and statistics. This is the second course in the quantitative methods sequence for our PhD students. Webpage for this course can be found here.

Political Science 149: Elections and Electioneering in California. A mid-level undergraduate class on the mechanics and profession of the electioneering. Blends political science research on voting and elections and with practitioner insight. Includes outside lectures by pollster, consultants, candidates, and members of the press.

Fall 2007

Not teaching

Spring 2007

Political Science 209: Special Topics in Formal Theory and Quantitative Methods. PhD research design course co-taught with John Zaller. Webpage for this course can be found here.

Political Science 172: Strategy and Conflict. Intermediate-level undergraduate game theory course focusing on application in international crisis bargaining. Webpage for this course can be found here.

Winter 2007

Political Science 200b: Introduction to probability and statistics. This is the second course in the quantitative methods sequence for our PhD students. Webpage for this course can be found here.

Fall 2006

Not teaching

Nominate project: Contains information and notes related to the rollcall vote data and scaling methods including NOMINATE. Documents an NSF funded project on the analysis of roll call voting.

PS200E: Contains readings, notes, and computer code related to Political Science 200E: Advanced Quantitative Methods in Political Science

Pasco punchcard/DRE: Contains code, results, and notes related to the Pasco FL voting technology project.

Crisis bargaining: Contains code, notes, and data related to the NSF-funded Crisis Bargaining project.

Roll call vote archiving and visualization: Contains specifications, code, notes and other information related to the development of a modular web-based rollcall archiving and visualization software development project.

Slate mail influence: Contains code, notes, and data related to the effectiveness of slate mailers.

Prof. Jeffrey B. Lewis
4289 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles CA 90095-1472

Email: jblewis(at)ucla(dot)edu

Tel: 310-206-5295
Fax: 310-825-0778