2008 Conference Program - Midwest Political Science Association

Thursday, April 3-4:45 pm
35-5 DISTRICTING AND VOTER PARTICIPATION
Room Salon 2 on the 3rd Floor, Thur at 4:45 pm
Chair Timothy Feddersen, Northwestern University
Paper A Measure of Bizarreness
We introduce a new measure of compactness of legislative districts:
The probability that a district will contain the shortest path between
a randomly selected pair of its’ residents.
Christopher P. Chambers, California Institute of Technology
chambers@hss.caltech.edu
Alan D. Miller, California Institute of Technology
alan@hss.caltech.edu
Paper Get Out the (Costly) Vote: Institutional Design for Greater
Participation
To address controversy surrounding recent proposals to offer
lottery prizes to voters, we examine voter lotteries within a formal
theoretical model where voting is costly and voters vary in their
information quality.
Dino Gerardi, Yale University
donato.gerardi@yale.edu
Margaret Anne McConnell, California Institute of Technology
mmcconnell@hss.caltech.edu
Julian Romero, California Institute of Technology
jnr@hss.caltech.edu
Leeat Yariv, California Institute of Technology
lyariv@hss.caltech.edu
Paper The Logic of Super-Victory: Incentives for Electoral Corruption
in Developing Countries
Elections in developing countries are often manipulated and won by
overwhelming margins. Existing ideas about electoral manipulation
do not easily explain this pattern. I propose that overwhelming
victory can be pursued to deter participation.
Alberto Simpser, University of Chicago
asimpser@uchicago.edu
Disc. Timothy Feddersen, Northwestern University
35-18 PRIMARIES AND ELECTORAL STRATEGIES II
Room PDR 9 on the 3rd Floor, Thur at 4:45 pm
Chair James Adams, University of California, Davis
jfadams@ucdavis.edu
Paper A Generalization of the Hotelling-Salop Model to M-Dimensions
This study generalizes to a structure allowing for (five types of
pure) location strategies in N-markets and m-dimensions. Results
applied to models of election competition, variants of median
voting, or indices of partisan competition.
Allen Bronson Brierly, Northern Iowa University
albrierly@aol.com
Paper Is the 50-State Strategy Optimal
With the 50-state strategy the DNC seeks to build its base in all
50 states. With a dynamic model of political campaign resource
allocation, this paper examines the critiscm that the strategy trades
off short-term gains for long-term party-building.
Dan Kovenock, Purdue University
kovenock@purdue.edu
Brian Roberson, Miami University
robersba@muohio.edu
Paper Why Primaries The Strategic Choice of a Candidate Selection
Method
Why do parties adopt primary elections Our premise is that
primary elections serve as a mechanism to reveal the campaigning
skills of candidates. However, this benefits might be offset by the
extremism of primary voters.
Gilles Serra, Oxford University
gilles.serra@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Paper
Disc.
Emergent Voter Behavior in Multi-Party Elections: An Agent
Based Simulation
A model of the endogenous dynamic evolution of voters’
preferences is implemented in a Netlogo simulation, serving
as a tool to explore the dynamic endogenous evolution of
voter preferences within the context of a spatial model of party
competition
Alberto Alexander Perez, Trinity College, Dublin
aperez@tcd.ie
James Adams, University of California, Davis
jfadams@ucdavis.edu
Jeffrey R. Lax, Columbia University
jrl2124@columbia.edu
36-5 METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES IN STUDYING
LEGISLATURES
Room UEH 413 on the 4th Floor, Thur at 4:45 pm
Chair John Wiggs Patty, Harvard University
jpatty@gov.harvard.edu
Paper What is a Seat Worth Evidence from the UK House of
Commons
We estimate the returns to political office by drawing upon a newly
created dataset that documents the political careers of almost 6000
candidates that ran for the UK House of Commons between 1950
and 1970.
Andy Eggers, Harvard University
aeggers@fas.harvard.edu
Jens Hainmueller, Harvard University
jhainm@fas.harvard.edu
Paper Drawing Your Senator From a Jar: Term Length and Legislator
Behavior
In Arkansas, Illinois and Texas, the term length of state senators was
randomly assigned after the elections of 1992 and 2002. I exploit
this unique randomization to estimate the causal effect of term
length on legislator behavior.
Rocio Titiunik, University of California, Berkeley
rocio@are.berkeley.edu
Paper Why Unsafe at Any Margin Incumbency Advantage and
Vulnerability
This paper estimates incumbency advantage without simultaneity
bias by decomposing error term into analyst's error and player’s
error. It also argues that incumbency vulnerability is caused by
redistricting, lack of seniority and media campaigns.
Kentaro Fukumoto, Gakushuin University
Kentaro.Fukumoto@gakushuin.ac.jp
Paper Exploiting Tom DeLay: A New Method for Estimating
Incumbency Advantage
We propose a new method for consistently estimating incumbency
advantage. We demonstrate that previous work which has used
redistricting to estimate incumbency advantage has compared the
wrong potential outcomes and results in biased estimates.
Jasjeet Singh Sekhon, University of California, Berkeley
sekhon@berkeley.edu
Rocio Titiunik, University of California, Berkeley
rocio@are.berkeley.edu
Paper Instrumental Variables Estimation Using Quasi-Instrumental
Variables
Quasi-instrumental variables are instruments that are not perfectly
exogenous. I examine how different instrumental variable estimators
are affected by using quasi-instruments instead of true instruments,
with an application to campaign spending.
Jay Goodliffe, Brigham Young University
goodliffe@byu.edu
Disc. Justin H. Gross, Carnegie Mellon University
jhgross@andrew.cmu.edu
150