Christopher N. Lawrence, Ph.D.

• Doctoral Dissertation
• Publications
• Manuscripts, Working Papers, and Conference Presentations
• Data Sets and Programs

Research

My research to date has focused on investigating three major themes using primary data collection and secondary data sources:

• The role of political information in voter decision-making.
• Legislator-constituent linkages in Congressional roll-call voting.
• The application of ecological inference algorithms to recover individual voting behavior from aggregated electoral returns (particularly in municipal elections, where polling data are scarce).

My dissertation and much of my recent research focuses on the first theme.

Dissertation

I completed my doctoral dissertation in December 2003 at the University of Mississippi.

The Impact of Political Sophistication on the Decision-Making Processes of Voters [949k]. Data used is from the 1992, 1994, 1996, and 2000 ANES and the 1998 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study, available via ICPSR.

Committee members: Harvey D. Palmer (chair), John M. Bruce, Charles E. Smith, and John P. Bentley (outside reader).

Publications

For full citation information, please refer to my curriculum vitae.

Publications in Peer-Reviewed Journals

• “Blogging in the Political Science Classroom,” written with Michelle L. Dion. Forthcoming in PS: Political Science and Politics, January 2010.

• “Of Shirking, Outliers, and Statistical Artifacts: Lame-Duck Legislators and Support for Impeachment.” Appeared in Political Research Quarterly, March 2007.

• “2006 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference: Teaching Research Methods Track Summary,” written with Amy Brandon, Mitchell Brown, and Jennifer van Heerde. Appeared in the July 2006 edition of PS: Political Science and Politics.

Other publications

• Regime Stability and Presidential Government: The Legacy of Authoritarian Rule, 1951-90; revised version of a paper presented at the 2001 Sigma Xi Research Week at the University of Mississippi. (An almost completely rewritten version of the paper below; the data used for this analysis is an augmented version of the ACLP data set. Updated as of 18 November 2001.) Published in translation in Ойкумена (Oikumene), the journal of the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies, Issue 5, 2007.

• “Quantian: A Comprehensive Scientific Computing Environment,” written with Dirk Eddelbuettel. Appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of The Political Methodologist.

Working and Conference Papers

All of these papers are in Adobe PDF format.

• Can We Really Have a Conversation about Race? Investigating Race-of-Interviewer Effects in the Contemporary South, with Scott H. Huffmon. To be presented at the 2010 Southern Political Science Association conference, January 2010. A slideshow presentation is also available.

• Known Unknowns and Unknown Knowns: Incorporating Uncertainty in Second-Stage Estimation. Based on a poster presented at the 2007 Meeting of the Society of Political Methodology.

• Geographic Data Visualization Using Open-Source Data and R. Poster presented at the 2009 Midwest Political Science Association Conference, April 2009.

• Reforming Research Methods at a Minority-Serving Institution, with Lynne L. Manganaro and Marcus Ynalvez. Presented at the 2009 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, February 2009.

• Return to Normalcy? Recent Elections in New Orleans. Presented at the 2008 Midwest Political Science Association Conference, April 2008.

• Textbook Methodology: Undergraduate Research Methods as Depicted in Textbooks. Presented at the 2008 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, February 2008.

• Should Voters Be Encyclopedias? Measuring Political Knowledge in the United States and the Netherlands. Revised version of a paper presented at MPSA in April 2007 (further revised from the version presented at SPSA in January 2007); presentations based on this research are available in PDF handout and slideshow form.

• Of Shirking, Outliers, and Statistical Artifacts: Lame-Duck Legislators and Support for Impeachment (updated as of 16 March 2006). A briefer version of this paper appeared as a research note in Political Research Quarterly in 2007 (see above).
  A previous version of the paper, as presented at APSA and SPSA, looking at the impeachment question more broadly is here.

• Estimating Cross-Over Voting in the 2005 Jackson, Miss. Democratic Mayoral Primary via Ecological Inference; paper presented at the 2006 SPSA conference.

• Political Sophistication and Conditional Strategic Behavior in U.S. Presidential Elections; paper presented at the 2005 SPSA Conference.
  Also available: the PDF slides from my April 2006 PARISS presentation at Duke in handout and slideshow form.

• Iraq, 9/11, and the War; paper presented at the 2004 MPSA Conference.

• Rock & Roll Will Never Die?: A discussion of the seeming failure of Rock The Vote, with Scott H. Huffmon (Winthrop University) and Bobbi Gentry (formerly at Winthrop, now a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center); paper presented at the 2003 APSA conference.

• Heuristics, Hillary Clinton, and Health Care Reform, with Harvey D. Palmer (formerly at the University of Mississippi, now at SUNY Buffalo); paper presented at the 2002 Annual National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association. Data used is from the 1994 National Election Study.

• Redundant Arrays of IDE Drives, with David A. Sanders and a host of other physicists at the University of Mississippi. Paper presented at the 2001 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference. Supported by U.S. Department of Energy grants DE-FG05-91ER40622 and DE-AC02-76CH03000.

• Deference or Dissent? Congress Responds to U.S. v. Eichman; paper presented at the 2001 SPSA Conference.

• The Evolution of the Normal Vote in the 1990s; paper presented at the 2001 WPSA Conference. (Data is from the NES.)

• Regime Stability and Presidential Government: A Preliminary Analysis, with Jennifer Hayes (now at the University of Houston); paper presented at the 2000 SPSA Conference.

• Beyond the Crossroads: Memphis at the Threshold of Non-Racial Politics?; paper presented at the 2000 MWPSA Conference.

Data Sets and Programs

Some of the materials at this website can also be accessed from within Stata using the following command:
net from http://www.cnlawrence.com/data/

• ACLP data set in Stata 6/7 format (compressed in a .zip file); this is the data used in Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi's book Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Material Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. You can download the codebook from José Antonio Cheibub's website at Penn. I have used the codebook to add variable and value labels and marked the -9's as missing values for Stata. Otherwise, the data is unchanged.

• 1999 Memphis municipal election returns and registration data, per precinct (cityonly.dta: Stata 6/7 format). This data was used in my paper “Beyond the Crossroads” and may be a useful dataset for trying various ecological inference algorithms.

• epcp is a neat little Stata routine that implements Michael Herron's "expected percentage correctly predicted" measure for limited dependent variable models; it also provides an "expected proportional reduction in error" measure. (Provided in GNU tar.gz format; also available as a zip archive.) See Political Analysis 8(1) if you are particulary interested in the theory behind the measure. Harvey Palmer helped out with the extensions to ordered logit/probit and multinomial logit. (Recently updated to be compatible with Stata versions 7–9, and hopefully Stata 10 as well.)

  An R version of "epcp" is in development as part of a larger package that will work with either the basic R estimators (lm, glm, polr, VGAM, etc.) or via the Zelig package. In the meantime, "hitmiss" in the pscl package does some of what epcp does.

• Data for other papers are available upon request; one of these decades, I'll get them all online.

• Projects: Debian (packages maintained); Quantian; GNU R.