Abstract for Belichick, McDaniels, and Patricia (2016)

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Grad school tips

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Today, my doctorate from Penn was officially conferred. In honor of this moment, I want to share some knowledge, how to be a graduate student. 1) A political science Ph.D. is a two-part process. The key dividing point is your comprehensive examinations (or field exams, or qualifying exams, or whatever. At Penn they were called "comps", which is the lingo I'll use). I would recommend a different approach to each side of the comps. Before comps, you should take advantage of what a graduate education is, a chance to get paid to read and explore a field of your interest. I took an eclectic collection of courses during my first two years, including an infamous "Great Books" of comparative politics. But what you want to do here is to scrape the surface of all these different possible fields you could be interested in, to see what works for you. A mistake that I've seen many graduate students fall into is being held prisoner by the topic they discussed in their...
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2022 Midterm Projection: Fundamentally Republican

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I think this is going to be an ugly election cycle for the Democrats. We can expect losses for the president's party in Congress in their first midterm election, and Joe Biden has not done anything to change my expectation. This is compounded by the fact that the economy seems to be the most pressing concern for voters, and inflation is a very difficult issue for policymakers to make go away or minimize. Since inflation is effectively making money less valuable, people that have a lot of money hate it , and even though unemployment is at a record low right, and many people in lower tax brackets have money in their pockets, it doesn't seem to go as far when you have to pay large bills for gas, heating your home or buying groceries.  So I believe we'll see the US House of Representatives swing to Republicans, probably with about 15-20 Democratic seat losses. Oddly, this is not actually that high of a number (Trump's party lost 41 in his only midterm, Obama lost 63 in his ...
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Intraclass Correlation: Picturebook Econometrics

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I presented a paper (published in Political Analysis ( link )) in my methods class this week on MRP, a technique for estimating state-level public opinion based on national surveys. One of there terms I needed to define is straight out of Downton Abbey , (which Wife, R.N. and I are ripping through at the moment). My analogy went over well in the class so, I thought, why not blog it? "Intraclass correlation" is a key concept in how to make MRP work (See Andrew Gelman's blog  for a nice overview). Being immersed in the Downton world, it became obvious to me... if we think about a measure for which all the Aristocratic Crawleys are similar, and the staff is all alike (say, in socioeconomic status) then there would be high ICC. However, I was corrected by my professor Marc Meredith (sidenote: he calls MRP, "Mr. P" without irony), who noted that the key to having high ICC is variation between groups (or regions in the case of US States) in addition to between indiv...
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