Research

My research combines substantive questions about political parties, elections, and representation with methodological questions about how we measure political preferences and political competition. Much of my work is comparative and cross-national, with a particular focus on Europe.

Parties, Voters, and Political Representation

A central theme of my research is the relationship between voters and political parties. I am particularly interested in what happens when the choices offered by political parties do not match the preferences of voters.

My work with Seth Jolly and Jonathan Polk has examined multidimensional voter-party incongruence, political dissatisfaction, support for anti-establishment parties, and vote switching. Our current work extends this research by examining where voters go when they abandon a party and whether switching produces a better ideological match or reflects broader dissatisfaction with the political choices available to them.

Related projects examine the development of political cleavages and the structure of party competition across different political systems, including Europe, the Global South, and the United States.

Political Parties and Ideological Competition

A second strand of my research examines how political competition is structured across countries and over time.

This work asks how political parties organize themselves along economic, social, cultural, and European integration dimensions, and whether these dimensions have comparable meanings across political systems. Recent projects examine party-system structuration outside Europe, the transnational cleavage, urban-rural political divisions, and the role of issue salience in party competition.

Much of this research draws on data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, for which I have served as Principal Investigator since 2008.

Political Measurement and Expert Surveys

My methodological research focuses particularly on political measurement. I am interested in the problems that arise when researchers attempt to measure concepts such as ideology, party positions, preferences, and perceptions across individuals and political contexts.

A substantial part of this work has involved developing and applying methods for placing parties and voters in common ideological spaces. My research has used Bayesian scaling, multidimensional scaling, anchoring vignettes, latent-variable models, and other approaches to political measurement.

My current work also turns the measurement problem back onto expert surveys themselves. How many experts are actually needed to obtain reliable estimates of party positions? Which survey questions provide genuinely distinct information? Can expert surveys be made substantially shorter without sacrificing measurement quality? These projects use the accumulated experience and data of CHES to study the design of expert surveys as measurement instruments.

Bayesian and Quantitative Methods

I have a longstanding interest in Bayesian statistics and quantitative research design. I have taught Bayesian methods at the ICPSR Summer Program, the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, the Global School in Empirical Research Methods at the University of St. Gallen, and in workshops and courses at universities in Europe and the United States.

My methodological work includes Bayesian approaches to scaling and latent-variable models as well as broader questions of measurement, cross-national comparability, and research design.

Current Projects

Some of my current collaborative projects include:

• Voter-party congruence and electoral switching — examining where disaffected voters go when they leave their previous party and whether their new choice provides better political representation.
• Party-system structuration in the Global South — studying the extent to which party competition is organized into coherent ideological dimensions outside established Western democracies.
• The salience of issue salience — comparing alternative approaches to measuring which political issues parties emphasize.
• How many experts are enough? — examining the relationship between the number of expert respondents and the reliability and precision of expert-survey estimates.
• Simplifying expert surveys — identifying redundant survey items and determining whether expert surveys can be shortened without meaningful information loss.
• National and local representation in the United States — studying how the relationship between citizens and political representatives varies across levels of government.

For published work related to these projects, see my Publications.