Published Papers
Why and How to Use Pre-Analysis Plans (with David Yokum). Forthcoming in Next Generation Evidence Eds. Ron Haskins and Kelly Fitzsimmon and Tamar Bauer. Brookings Institution Press. 2023.
The influence of social norms varies with 'others' groups: Evidence from COVID-19 vaccination intentions (with Nat Rabb, David Glick, and David Yokum) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2022.
The limits of nudges: Results of a statewide vaccination RCT (With Nat Rabb, Megan Swindal, David Glick, Kevin Wilson, Anna Tomasulo, Zayid Oyelami, David Yokum.) Nature. 2022.
The Theory and Practice of Field Experiments: An Introduction from the EGAP Learning Days (with Maarten Voors and Nahomi Ichino). An open-source textbook aimed at instructors of an introductory course in randomized field experiments. 2021.
"No evidence that collective-good appeals best promote Covid-related health behaviors." (with Nathaniel Rabb, David Glick, Attiyya Houston, David Yokum) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2021 .
Causality and Design-Based Inference with Thomas Leavitt . in The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations eds. Curini and Franzese. forthcoming. 2020.
Better government, Better Science: The Promise of and Challenges facing the Evidence-Informed Policy Movement . (with Paul Testa ) Annual Review of Political Science, 2019. Discussed in Knowable Magazine in Can science solve the poverty problem? An evidence-based policy movement is arming the fight with tools and programs that are more effective than ever before
Maps in People's Heads: Assessing A New Measure of Context. (with Cara Wong, Daniel Rubenson, Mark Fredrickson, Ashlea Rundlett) Political Science Research and Methods, 2018.
Models, methods and network topology: Experimental design for the study of interference. (with Bruce A. Desmarais, Mark Frederickson, Nahomi Ichino, Hsuan-Wei Lee, Simi Wang) Social Networks , 2018. 54:196-208.
Challenges to Replication and Iteration in Field Experiments: Evidence from two Direct Mail Shots. (with Nathaniel Higgins, Dean Karlan, Sarah Tulman, and Jonathan Zinman) American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings) , 2017. 107(5):1--3.
How to improve your relationship with your future self (V 2.0) (with Maarten Voors) Revista de Ciencia Politica 2016 36:3 p 829--848. Github
Research Note: A More Powerful Test Statistic for Reasoning about Interference between Units (with Peter Aronow and Mark Fredrickson). Political Analysis doi:10.1093/pan/mpw018 published online July 2016. This paper follows up on the paper on statistical inference for experiments on social networks discussed on the OUP blog .
Comment: Method Games---A Proposal for Assessing and Learning about Methods A plea and a plan to enable comparisons of methods for pattern detection including QCA and other machine learning algorithms Sociological Methodology published online 28 July 2014 DOI: 10.1177/0081175014542078 . This paper suggests two ways for proponents of different methods to communicate with each other using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and machine learning (ex. the adapative lasso) as examples.
6+ Things you need to know about cluster randomization (with Ashlea Rundlett) This is an EGAP methodology guide.
Reasoning about Interference Between Units: A General Framework (with Mark Fredrickson and Costas Panagopoulos ). Political Analysis 2013 21:97--124. The reproduction archive for the paper has been published in my dataverse ( or feel free to use a direct link to the study). A direct link to the pdf is here This paper won the Miller Prize for best work appearing in Political Analysis in 2013.
Bringing the Person Back In: Boundaries, Perceptions, and the Measurement of Racial Context (with Cara Wong, Tarah Williams, and Katherine Drake) The Journal of Politics 2012. Vol 74, No. 4.
Making Effects Manifest in
Randomized Experiments in the
Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science eds. James
N. Druckman, Donald P. Green, James H. Kuklinski, and Arthur Lupia. Cambridge
Univ Press. 2011.
The pdf file available here is the paper before
copy-editing.
The compendium, or reproduction archive, for the paper is
available as a package for the R statistical computing environment. See this
little tutorial file for
detailed instructions about how to download and use it.
Six steps to a better relationship with your future self. The Political Methodologist. 2011. Vol 18, No. 2. The original Sweave file used to produce this article can be accessed here
Attributing Effects to a Cluster Randomized Get-Out-The-Vote Campaign (with Ben Hansen ) Journal of the American Statistical Association 2009.
The compendium, or reproduction archive, for the paper has been published in my dataverse ( or feel free to use a direct link to the study) The working paper version of this article won the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha award for best paper presentat at APSA 2010. A policy brief about this paper can be found at the EGAP website .
(For more about reproduction archives in general see Gentleman, R and D. Lang. 2004. "Statistical Analyses and Reproducible Research." )
Covariate Balance in Simple, Stratified and Clustered Comparative Studies (with Ben Hansen ) Statistical Science 2008, Vol. 23, No. 2, 219-236. A typo on page 4 exists such that the variance of d should be Var(d) = (m/(mtmc))s2.
Politics across Generations: Family Transmission Reexamined (with Kent Jennings and Laura Stoker). The Journal of Politics 2009, Vol 71, No. 3, 782-799.
EDA for HLM: Visualization when Probabilistic Inference Fails (with Katherine Drake). Political Analysis. 2005, 13 (4):301-326. The Sweave source file and datasets used to produce this article have been published in my dataverse ( or feel free to use a direct link to the study)
"Using R to Keep it Simple: Exploring Structure in Multilevel Datasets" Fall 2004. The Political Methodologist. The Sweave file and datasets used to produce this article can be downloaded as a zipped archive here
Analyzing the 2000 National Election Study (with Nancy Burns, Michael Ensley, and Don Kinder). 2005. Political Analysis . 13(1):109-111.
"Does Moving Disrupt Campaign Activity?" August 2004. Political Psychology. 21(4):525-543.
"Designing Multi-level Studies: Sampling Voters and Electoral Contexts" (with Laura Stoker). 2002. Electoral Studies 21(2):235-267. This file includes the correct Figure 3 (published as an Erratum in the next issue of Electoral Studies).
(Figure 1 in color -- PDF, about .3MB)
Supplementary results and simulation programs are available on this
page .
Technical Reports
Attributing Effects to A Cluster Randomized Get-Out-The-Vote Campaign. (with Ben Hansen ). University of Michigan, Dept of Statistics Technical Report # 448. October 2006. (pdf version here)
"Issues in Analyzing Data from the Dual-Mode 2000 American National Election Study" (with Michael Ensley). NES Technical Report #64. (April 2003).
"Black Threat and Christian Fundamentalist Threat: A National Election Study 1997 Pilot Study Report" 1997 NES Pilot Study Report
NES Pilot Study Efforts to Measure Values and Predispositions. NES Technical Report #18. (February 1995)