This paper presents a software package designed to estimate Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores in R. The package uses a logistic regression model to analyze political choice data, usually (though not exclusively) from a legislative setting. In contrast to other scaling methods, W-NOMINATE...

The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged ‘fourth wave’ of democratization? We argue that questions about the...

Do legislators respond to congressional redistricting? A central tenet of American legislative scholarship over the last 20 years argues that members of Congress maintain consistent ideological positions throughout their tenure, and thus do not generally adapt their voting records to changes in...

Recent work in political science has taken up the question of issue voting under conditions of uncertainty – situations in which voters have imperfect information about the policy positions of candidates. We move beyond the assumption of a particular spatial utility function and develop a...

poLCA is a software package for the estimation of latent class and latent class regression models for polytomous outcome variables, implemented in the R statistical computing environment. Both models can be called using a single simple command line. The basic latent class model is a finite...