James Lo

This article presents a scaling approach to jointly estimate the locations of voters, parties, and European political groups on a common left-right scale. Although most comparative research assumes that cross-national comparisons of voters and parties are possible, few correct for systematic biases commonly known to exist in surveys or examine whether survey data are comparable across countries. Our scaling method addresses scale perception in surveys and links cross-national surveys through new bridging observations. We apply our approach to the 2009 European Election Survey and demonstrate that the improvement in party estimates that one gains from fixing various survey bias issues is significant. Our scaling strategy provides left-right positions of voters and of 162 political parties, and we demonstrate that variables based on rescaled voter and party positions on the left-right dimension significantly improve the fit of a cross-national vote choice model.

This paper examines how income levels affected the substitution of public health insurance for private health coverage under expansions of Illinois' State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Building on a technique developed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), I estimate that among children whose family incomes are between 200% and 300% of the federal poverty level (FPL), 35% of those covered by SCHIP would have retained private coverage in the absence of SCHIP. Significant substitution also appears between 300% and 400% FPL, but surprisingly I find evidence that the introduction of SCHIP caused an increase in private health insurance coverage for those with family incomes between 400% and 500% FPL.

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 the electoral environment. In contrast, a second literature argues that legislators are predominantly motivated by electoral incentives through an electoral connection, forcing them to adapt to the shifting environment as agents of the electorate. In this research note, I test these competing theories using data from the 2003 Texas redistricting. Despite being treated to a targeted gerrymander subjecting them to extreme electoral pressure, I find little evidence of ideological adaption in the voting records of eight Democrats that were targeted for defeat. My results thus confirm the earlier findings of Poole (2007) and have broader implications for the study of political representation and polarization.