Jonathan N. Katz

Professor of Political Science
2000, (and 1995--1998)

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Research interests

American politics, formal political theory, and political methodology.

Research Statement

My current research in political science can be grouped into three areas: Statistics/Econometrics, American Politics, and Formal Theory/Political Economy. I will consider each in turn.

STATISTICS/ECONOMETRICS

• I am currently completing a monograph on the econometrics/statistics of time-series-cross-sectional data with Nathaniel Beck (New York University) and Thomas Pl.umber (University of Essex). The book is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press. The manuscript includes both review material as well as new results for various proposed estimators in the field.
• Robert Sherman and I are working with a graduate student, Delia Grigg, on developing a more efficient estimator for discrete data with temporal dependence based on an iterative least squares/EM approach.
• I am currently finishing up a paper entitled, "Correcting for Survey Misreports using Auxiliary Information". As the title suggest the paper develops an estimator to correct for systematic bias based on a mixture model approach with an application to validated vote data from the U.S. and the U.K.

AMERICAN POLITICS

• Gary Cox (University of California, San Diego) and I are working on a paper examining the impact of change in Supreme Court precedent on lower court discretion with data from election law cases.
• I am working on several paper on voting rights issues. The first is a paper with a graduate student, Delia Grigg, on the impact of majority-minority district on U.S. Congressional elections. The second paper, joint work with Andrew Gelman (Columbia University) and Gary King (Harvard University), develops a new method to measure the "racial fairness" of proposed redistricting plans that has both sounder theoretical foundations and can be practically implemented by courts.
• Andrew Gelman (Columbia University) and I are working on a paper that estimates the value of moderation by incumbents in U.S. House Elections - a central, yet unknown, quantity of interest in the current debates about the polarization of American politics.

FORMAL THEORY/POLITICAL ECONOMY

• Jernej Copic, a graduate student in the Division, and I are finishing up a paper that develops a model of endogenous scheduling of legislative business. It treats the scheduling problem as a multigood auction where the scheduling agent (e.g., the Speaker and Rules Committee in the U.S. House) chooses which limited number of bills to be voted on by their policy consequences from her perspective, which may be multidimensional. We are also working on extensions to the case of procurement auctions when the auction designer is evaluating multidimensional bids (i.e., not only price).

Publications

Elbridge Gerry's Salamander: The Political Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution. (with G. Cox). New York: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.

Post-stratification without population level information on the post-stratifying variable, with application to political polling (with C. Reilly and A. Gelman). Journal of the American Statistical Association. 96(453):1--11.

A Statistical Model for Multiparty Electoral Data (with G. King). American Political Science Review. 93(1):15--32. 1999.

Indecision Theory: Explaining Selective Abstention in Multiple Elections (with P. Ghirardato). Caltech Social Science Working Paper No. 1106.