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This paper is the first in a larger project to estimate Congress-Administrator-President (CAP) scores, or ideal point estimates for federal cabinet secretaries, presidents, and members of congress on a common scale. In this paper, we present ideal point estimates for labor secretaries, presidents, and members of the Senate from 1991-2002. Two sets of estimates have been generated: (a) single-congress W-NOMINATE estimates with bootstrapped standard errors (Lewis and Poole 2004), and (b) Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods in a Bayesian framework (Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004; Martin and Quinn 2003). Administrative positions have been constructed through a content analysis of congressional testimony in which an administrator expresses a position on a bill submitted to a roll-call vote in the current Senate session. Results indicate that most labor secretaries have ideal points distinct from their appointing presidents, questioning the assumptions of much of the theoretical literature on the executive branch. Also, using the CAP scores for labor secretaries and senators, we examine the effect of secretary preferences on the allocation of distributive policy projects. We find that the distances between the labor secretary and senators of the same party (Republican) in the 107 th Congress are directly related to the amount of labor department funding allocated to the senator?s state: the further the secretary?s ideal point is from senators of her own party, the less those senators receive in labor outlays. The implications are that the preferences of unelected officials have a direct impact on policy outcomes in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper systematically assesses the common claim that the United States is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world in multilateral institutions. It employs a new data set that includes post-Cold War roll-call votes in multilateral institution that are identified as important by the U.S. State Department. A multilevel item-response model is developed that allows for differentiation between trends in the preferences of states and trends in the agenda. The model is estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. The results reveal that states have indeed gradually shifted their preferences away from the U.S. from 1991 to 2001. But, these changes are independent from shifts in the agenda. During the first half of the 1990s the agenda became more positive for the U.S. thanks to its multilateral initiatives, whereas unilateralist tendencies led to an opposite shift since 1998. Changes in preferences, however, develop at a constant rate. This suggests that the unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy is not solely responsible for the increased gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The paper discusses the policy and theoretical implications of these findings as well as interesting deviations from the common trend by individual countries. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effects of government partisanship on the (inflation-adjusted) growth rate of social spending per capita in 17 OECD countries over the period 1962-98. We estimate partisan effects separately for "liberal market economies" and "social market economies," and use 15-year moving windows to capture changes in these effects. The influential "Varieties-of-Capitalism approach" suggests that in social market economies, employers as well as workers have a strong interest in the maintenance of existing systems of social protection and public provision. Contrary to expectations that we derive from this approach, our results indicate that partisan conflict over welfare spending has become more intense in social market economies than liberal market economies over the last two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we utilize theories originally developed to explain US congressional organization to analyze legislative organization in Argentina [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A "folk criticism" in political science maintains that the discipline should confine its efforts to explanation and avoid venturing down the dark, dirty, and dangerous path to forecasting and prediction. I argue that not only is this position inconsistent with the experiences of other sciences, but in fact the questions involved in making robust and valid predictions invoke many core methodological issues in political analysis. Those issues include, among others, the question of the level of predictability in political behavior, the problem of case selection in small-N situations, and the various alternative models that could be used to formalize predictions. This essay focuses on the problem of forecasting in international politics, and concludes by noting some of the problems of institutional culture-bureaucratic and academic-that have inhibited greater use of systematic forecasting methods in foreign policy. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a parametric framework for estimation and inference in cointegrated panel data models is considered that is based on a cointegrated VAR(p) model. A convenient two-step estimator is suggested where in the first step all individual specific parameters are estimated and in the second step the long-run parameters are estimated from a pooled least-squares regression. The two-step estimator and related test procedures can easily be modified to account for contemporaneously correlated errors, a feature that is often encountered in multi-country studies. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that the two-step estimator and related test procedures outperform semiparametric alternatives such as the fully modified OLS (FMOLS) approach, especially if the number of time periods is small. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a robust estimation method for regression models for vectors of counts (overdispersed multinomial models). The method [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the decline-of-partisanship thesis has become a dominant perspective in the existing comparative welfare state literature, we argue that the salience of the partisan composition of government for social policy outcomes has increased. Using an innovative approach to measure welfare effort, we explore the effects of government partisanship on social spending growth in 17 OECD countries in 1963-94 period. A robust regression analysis of a pooled time-series cross section data and a moving-windows analysis of fixed-length data points unambiguously support our expectations that Left governments became more distinctively "pro-welfare" in the course of the 1970s and 1980s. We also find that the positive effect of union strength on welfare effort rose through the 1980s. Evidence shows that levels of welfare spending have been consistently associated with lower rates of spending growth throughout the period, suggesting cross-national convergence of welfare states. Our analysis rejects the notion of welfare state expansion as a self-perpetuating process and finds no evidence that supports the decline-of-partisanship thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]