Keith Poole

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I am the Philip H. Alston, Jr. Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Department of Political Science, the University of Georgia. My research interests include American Political-Economic History, Congress, Economic Growth and Entrepreneurship, and the Political-Economic History of Railroads. I am the author or coauthor of over 50 articles as well as the author of Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a coauthor of Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2013), Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (MIT Press 2006

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Judith L Green

University of California, Santa Barbara

E. Wayne Ross

University of British Columbia

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

Florin Curta

University of Florida

Seda Pekşen

Ankara University

Harry Cleaver

The University of Texas at Austin

Shabib H . Syed

University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan

Emre Hatipoglu

Sabanci University

ELCHİN SULEYMANOV

Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

Massimo Prearo

Università di Verona

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Papers by Keith Poole

Patterns of Congressional Voting

American Journal of Political Science, Feb 1, 1991

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Bayesian Metric Multidimensional Scaling

Social Science Research Network, 2012

In this article, we show how to apply Bayesian methods to noisy ratio scale distances for both th... more In this article, we show how to apply Bayesian methods to noisy ratio scale distances for both the classical similarities problem as well as the unfolding problem. Bayesian methods produce essentially the same point estimates as the classical methods, but are superior in that they provide more accurate measures of uncertainty in the data. Identification is nontrivial for this class of problems because a configuration of points that reproduces the distances is identified only up to a choice of origin, angles of rotation, and sign flips on the dimensions. We prove that fixing the origin and rotation is sufficient to identify a configuration in the sense that the corresponding maxima/minima are inflection points with full-rank Hessians. However, an unavoidable result is multiple posterior distributions that are mirror images of one another. This poses a problem for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The approach we take is to find the optimal solution using standard optimizers. The configuration of points from the optimizers is then used to isolate a single Bayesian posterior that can then be easily analyzed with standard MCMC methods.

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Political Polarization and Income Inequality

Social Science Research Network, 2003

Since the early 1970s, American society has undergone two important parallel transformations, one... more Since the early 1970s, American society has undergone two important parallel transformations, one political and one economic. Following a period with mild partisan divisions, post-1970s politics is increasingly characterized by an ideologically polarized party system. Similarly, the 1970s mark an end to several decades of increasing economic equality and the beginning of a trend towards greater inequality of wealth and income. While the literature on comparative political economy has focused on the links between economic inequality and political conflict, the relationship between these trends in the United States remains essentially unexplored. We explore the relationship between voter partisanship and income from 1956 to 1996. We find that over this period of time partisanship has become more stratified by income. We argue that this trend is the consequence both of polarization of the parties on economic issues and increased economic inequality.

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Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap

Political Analysis, 2004

Over the last 15 years a large amount of scholarship in legislative politics has used NOMINATE or... more Over the last 15 years a large amount of scholarship in legislative politics has used NOMINATE or other similar methods to construct measures of legislators' ideological locations. These measures are then used in subsequent analyses. Recent work in political methodology has focused on the pitfalls of using such estimates as variables in subsequent analysis without explicitly accounting for their uncertainty and possible bias (Herron and Shotts 2003, Political Analysis 11:44-64). This presents a problem for those employing NOMINATE scores because estimates of their unconditional sampling uncertainty or bias have until now been unavailable. In this paper, we present a method of forming unconditional standard error estimates and bias estimates for NOMINATE scores using the parametric bootstrap. Standard errors are estimated for the 90th U.S. Senate in two dimensions. Standard errors of first-dimension placements are in the 0.03 to 0.08 range. The results are compared with those obtained using the Markov chain Monte Carlo estimator of Clinton et al. (2002, Stanford University Working Paper). We also show how the bootstrap can be used to construct standard errors and confidence intervals for auxiliary quantities of interest such as ranks and the location of the median senator.

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The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics

Polity, Jul 1, 2014

Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Re... more Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties is higher than at any time since the end of the Civil War. This essay describes how the modern polarization trend emerged and its implications for mass political behavior and public policy outcomes. We contend that contemporary political polarization must be understood in terms of both the ideological divergence of the parties and the expansion of the liberal-conservative dimension of conflict to a wider set of social and cultural conflicts in American society. We close with the speculation that the Republican Party has become the more fractured of the parties along the liberal-conservative dimension at both the elite and mass level.

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Big Data in Political Science Research

AUTHOR COPY The Polarization of Contemporary

Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Re... more Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties is higher than at any time since the end of the Civil War. This essay describes how the modern polarization trend emerged and its implications for mass political behavior and public policy outcomes. We contend that contemporary political polarization must be understood in terms of both the ideological divergence of the parties and the expansion of the liberal–conservative dimension of conflict to a wider set of social and cultural conflicts in American society. We close with the speculation that the Republican Party has become the more fractured of the parties along the liberal–conservative dimension at both the elite and mass level. Polity (2014) 46, 411–429. doi:10.1057/pol.2014.10

The Spatial Mapping of Congressional Candidates and Contributors

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 1992

... EconPapers has moved to http://EconPapers.repec.org! Please update your bookmarks. The Spatia... more

Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2008

Page 1. 1 Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches Chapter 2 The Polarization ... more

Income redistribution and the realignment of American politics

Nolan M. Mccarty, Keith T. Poole, Howard Rosenthal. (1997). 1989-and distribution government inco... more

Chapter 6. Historical Lessons of the Responses to Pops

Princeton University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2013

Chapter 1. Bubble Expectations

Princeton University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2013

Congress and the Territorial Expansion of the United States

Social Science Research Network, 1999

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14. Congress and the Territorial Expansion of the United States

Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress, Volume 1

Estimates of the Spatial Voting Model

The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, Volume 2

In this chapter, the authors survey the empirical success of the spatial (or geometric) theory of... more In this chapter, the authors survey the empirical success of the spatial (or geometric) theory of voting. Empirical work lagged behind the development of theory until about 30 years ago and since then has exploded, with ideal-point estimation emerging as an important methodological subfield in political science. Empirical applications of spatial theory are now legion, and the basic news is that the spatial model has been enormously successful in explaining observed political choices and outcomes at both the elite and mass levels. In the United States, empirical estimates of the spatial model also help to explain incongruities between the median voter theorem and party polarization. These empirical estimates have demonstrated that the theory is extremely powerful on a number of levels—indeed, that it is one of the most successful mathematical theories in the social sciences.

Unfolding Analysis of Rating Scale Data

Analyzing Spatial Models of Choice and Judgment, 2020

Unfolding Analysis of Binary Choice Data

Bayesian Scaling Models

Chapter 2. Ideology

Estados Unidos. La polarización partidista y su efecto sobre la democracia

Patterns of Congressional Voting

American Journal of Political Science, Feb 1, 1991

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Bayesian Metric Multidimensional Scaling

Social Science Research Network, 2012

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Political Polarization and Income Inequality

Social Science Research Network, 2003

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Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap

Political Analysis, 2004

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The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics

Polity, Jul 1, 2014

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Big Data in Political Science Research

AUTHOR COPY The Polarization of Contemporary

Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Re... more Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties is higher than at any time since the end of the Civil War. This essay describes how the modern polarization trend emerged and its implications for mass political behavior and public policy outcomes. We contend that contemporary political polarization must be understood in terms of both the ideological divergence of the parties and the expansion of the liberal–conservative dimension of conflict to a wider set of social and cultural conflicts in American society. We close with the speculation that the Republican Party has become the more fractured of the parties along the liberal–conservative dimension at both the elite and mass level. Polity (2014) 46, 411–429. doi:10.1057/pol.2014.10

The Spatial Mapping of Congressional Candidates and Contributors

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 1992

... EconPapers has moved to http://EconPapers.repec.org! Please update your bookmarks. The Spatia... more