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Speaker Series 2003-04

    Paul Kellstedt
    Texas A&M University
    "National Moods and Issue-Specific Opinion Dynamics"
    Thursday, November 13, 2003

    Abstract: Aggregate public opinion drifts in both liberal and conservative directions over time. And yet, when opinion does move, pundits and analysts tend to assume that the shift is the result of issue-specific politics. On the other hand, the recent theoretical and empirical advancements surrounding the existence of a cross-issues liberal-conservative Mood might suggest the opposite-that all single-issue movement is a function of the shifting national Mood. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which Mood dominates issue-specific opinion, and (by implication) the extent to which issue-specific opinion moves independently of Mood. We pursue this agenda by examining three issue areas-education, the environment, and health care. A substantial part of this project involves the measurement of national Mood, and, in particular, aggregate issue-specific opinion. We use Stimson's (1991) measure of national Mood, and a large database of over-time survey marginals to construct time-series measures of issue-specific opinion through a process that is analogous to dynamic factor analysis, but which allows for missing data. We compare these issue-specific opinion indices to Mood, and then purge each index of the part that Mood can explain. We conclude by speculating on the forces, including policy feedback and the cycles of issue attention, that might cause issue-specific opinion to diverge from the broader trend in Mood.

    Bio: Paul Kellstedt is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University with research interests in American politics, public opinion, and political methodology. He is the author of The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

    Walter Enders
    University of Alabama
    "After 9/11: Is It All Different Now?" (Sponsored by the Mershon Center)
    Friday, April 9, 2004

    Abstract: Using time-series procedures, we investigate whether transnational terrorism changed following 9/11 and the subsequent US-led "war on terrorism." Perhaps surprising, little has changed to the time series of overall incidents and most of its component series. When 9/11 is prejudged as a break date, we find that logistically complex hostage-taking events have fallen as a proportion of all events, while logistically simple, but deadly, bombings have increased as a proportion of deadly incidents. These results hold when we apply the Bai-Perron procedure where structural breaks are data identified. This procedure locates earlier breaks in the mid-1970s and 1990s. Reasonable out-of-sample forecasts are possible if structural breaks are incorporated fairly rapidly into the model.

    Bio: Professor Enders is an expert in time series analysis, and his book, Applied Econometric Time-Series, is the leading book in the field; it is also used in the ITV Time Series course being taught now. Enders' current research focuses on the development and application of time-series models to areas in economics and finance.

    View a Real Media stream of his presentation.

    Narayan Sastry
    RAND Corporation
    "Family and Neighborhood Effects on Inequality in Children's Well-Being"
    Thursday, May 6, 2004

    Abstract: This paper examines family and neighborhood sources of socioeconomic inequality in children's well-being. We consider children's reading and mathematics achievement as well as behavioral problems. We use data from the 2000-2001 Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study, a new survey designed to support multilevel studies on a number of topics. To describe inequality in children's well-being, we use Gini coefficients and concentration indices and multilevel regression models. We find no inequality in children s achievement by family income once other variables in the model were held constant. Mothers reading scores and average neighborhood levels of income account for the largest proportion of inequality in children's achievement.

    Bio: Narayan Sastry is a research scientist at RAND Corporation. He holds a Ph.D. in public affairs from Princeton University. Sastry's research focuses on child health and mortality, population and development, and aging. Sastry possesses methodological interests in duration models and multilevel modeling. His work has appeared in Journal of the American Statistical Association, Demography, and other journals.

    Douglas Rivers
    Stanford University
    "Panel Data Methods in Political Science" (Co-sponsored with ITV)
    Wednesday, May 5, 2004

    Bio: Doug Rivers is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, and a Research Fellow at the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society. Dr. Rivers specializes in American Politics and the statistical analysis of electoral data. In 2000, he was named Market Research Executive of the Year by the Research Business Report.

    View a Real Media stream of his presentation.

    David Darmofal
    University of Illinois
    "Spatial Econometrics and Models of Political Behavior"
    Wednesday, May 19, 2004

    Abstract: All data are spatial data: political behaviors in which we are interested occur at discrete geographic locations. Many of our models of political behavior posit that these locations shape political behavior as the behavior of observed units is influenced by units in close proximity. Despite these theoretical advances, our empirical tests of spatial effects on behavior have often lagged behind. Recent advances in spatial econometrics and geographic information systems (GIS) now allow for much more rigorous testing of spatial influences on political behavior than has previously been possible. This talk will examine the problems that spatial effects pose for standard approaches to statistical inference. It will also examine the statistical foundations of spatial econometrics. The talk will conclude by examining how spatial effects are estimated using spatial econometric models, with particular applications to political behaviors.

    Bio: David Darmofal holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and will be PRISM Senior Methods Fellow at Ohio State University in the 2004-05 academic year. He has research interests in political behavior and quantitative methods.

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