In a spatial common agency model, two asymmetric interest groups (principals) in‡uence a unique decision-maker (agent). The decision-maker chooses a onedimensional policy on behalf of those principals and has private information about his ideology after contracting with principals. The policy is always e¢ cient and re‡ects a weighted average between the principals’ and the agent’s ideal points....

We seek to measure political candidates’ ideological positioning from their speeches. To accomplish this, we infer ideological cues from a corpus of political writings annotated with known ideologies. We then represent the speeches of U.S. Presidential candidates as sequences of cues and lags (filler distinguished only by its length in words). We apply a domain-informed Bayesian HMM to infer th...

In recent years, the Democratic Party has been considerably more successful at electing women than the Republican Party. Research suggests that the Democratic advantage for women stems from a more inclusive party culture and party support for women-friendly policies. This paper considers whether the gender gap in representation between the parties may also be shaped by intersection of instituti...

The American judiciary, like other branches of government, has increasingly come under attack as both ideologically driven and polarized. At the same time, scholars have limited understanding of the extent to which politicization has shaped the courts or how its influence varies among tiers of the judiciary and across states. We present a simple theory of judicial politicization that models the...

This paper analyzes the ideological orientations of Canadian university professors based on a unique 2000 study of a representative sample of Canadian academics (n=3,318). After summarizing methodological problems with extant research on this subject, and tentatively comparing the political views of Canadian and American academics, the paper demonstrates that Canadian academics fall to the left...

In this paper, we discuss the applicability of the knowledge representation language A-Prolog for the design and implementation of a commonsense knowledge base about ideologies. We also present a formalization of a simple motivating story, which involves an ideological conflict between countries. The emphasis is on the development and implementation of a commonsense knowledge base needed for th...

It is widely thought that news organizations exhibit ideological bias, but rigorously quantifying such slant has proven methodologically challenging. Through a combination of machinelearning and crowdsourcing techniques, we investigate the selection and framing of political issues in fifteen major US news outlets. Starting with 803,146 news stories published over twelve months, we first used su...