Welcome

You've reached the website of Dan Pemstein, an assistant professor of political science at North Dakota State University. I'm a methodologist who specializes in measurement and builds statistical tools to answer substantive questions in comparative legislative studies and political economy. One thread of my work uses purpose-built statistical models and natural language processing techniques to ask how institutions channel information and ambition to shape behavior by politicians and parties in the European Union. Another branch of my research adapts tools from educational testing and legislative studies to address key measurement problems in the study of comparative institutions. I also study digital political economy and dabble at the intersection of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology.

I am involved in a number of software and data projects. In particular, I am a co-author of the Scythe Statistical Library, an open source C++ library for statistical computation, and a co-developer of the Unified Democracy Scores, a set of measures that leverage the efforts of a variety of experts to provide a composite scale of democracy, accompanied by estimates of measurement uncertainty. I also serve as project manager for measurement methods for, and sit on the steering committee of, the Varieties of Democracy project.

My research has been funded by a variety of sources including the National Science Foundation, Google, the European Union Center at the University of Illinois, and—through a subcontract from the University of Gothenburg—the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

Research

You can find my publications, selected working papers, and some data below. Take a look at my CV or google scholar profile if you want detail.

Publications

• Google Politics: The Political Determinants of Internet Censorship in Democracies

  (with Stephen Meserve)

  (Forthcoming) Political Science Research and Methods. Accepted conditional on editorial replication of empirical results.

  [Appendix] [Replication Package]

• Brussels Bound: Policy Experience and Candidate Selection in European Elections

  (with Stephen Meserve and William Bernhard)

  (2015) Comparative Political Studies 48(11): 1421-1453

  [Ungated] [Replication Package]

• What You See is What You Get: Webcam Placement Influences Perception and Social Coordination

  (with Laura Thomas)

  (2015) Frontiers in Psychology (Cognition) 6(306)

  [Replication Package]

• V-Dem: A New Way to Measure Democracy

  (with Staffan Lindberg, Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Alan Hicken, Matthew Kroenig, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Megan Reif, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Eitan Tzelgov, and Yi-ting Wang)

  (2014) Journal of Democracy 25(3): 159-169

• The Scythe Statistical Library: An Open Source C++ Library for Statistical Computation

  (with Kevin Quinn and Andrew Martin)

  (2011) Journal of Statistical Software 42(12)

  [Replication Package]

• Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type

  (with James Melton and Stephen Meserve)

  (2010) Political Analysis 18(4): 426-449

  [UDS Data] [UDS Tutorial] [Replication Package]

• Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament

  (with Stephen Meserve and William Bernhard)

  (2009) Journal of Politics 71(3): 1015-1032

  [Ungated] [Appendix]

Selected Working Papers

• The Power of Suggestion: Coordinating Compromise in a Bicameral Legislature

• The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data

  (with Kyle Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, and Farhad Miri)

• Evaluating and Improving Item Response Theory Models for Cross-National Expert Surveys

  (with Eitan Tzelgov and Yi-ting Wang)

• Strategies of Validation: Assessing the Varieties of Democracy Corruption Data

  (with Kelly McMann, Brigitte Seim, Jan Teorell, and Staffan Lindberg)

Data

• Unified Democracy Scores

  A set of measures that leverage the efforts of a variety of experts to provide a composite scale of democracy, accompanied by estimates of measurement uncertainty. The scores are available for virtually every country in the world from 1946 through 2012.

• Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)

  V-Dem is a collaborative project, involving over 3,000 social scientists and policy practitioners worldwide, that seeks to measure hundreds of the regime characteristics that underpin democratic government, both cross-nationally and over time.

• My Dataverse

Teaching

• Introduction to Comparative Politics

  • Syllabus

• Comparative Democratic Institutions

  • Syllabus

• Digital Politics

  • Syllabus

• Global Policy Issues

  • Syllabus

• Comparative Legislative Behavior

  • Syllabus

• Research Methods

  • Syllabus

• Introduction to European Studies

  • Syllabus

Computing

• The Scythe Statistical Library

  A C++ library for statistical computation co-authored with Kevin M. Quinn (University of California, Berkeley) and Andrew D. Martin (University of Michigan). Scythe includes a suite of matrix manipulation functions, a suite of pseudo-random number generators, and a suite of numerical optimization routines. Scythe sits under the hood of a number of R packages, most notably MCMCpack, and has been used in published work in fields ranging from political science to computational statistics, dentistry, finance, molecular ecology, physics, and volcanology. Scythe is free software.

• This tutorial on the UDS website demonstrates how to use posterior samples from MCMC in subsequent analyses. The example is intended to explain how to use the Unified Democracy Scores correctly, but is generally applicable. So, for example, if you want to use Clinton-Jackman-Rivers or Martin-Quinn style ideal point estimates in your research and want to correctly incorporate posterior uncertainty in the ideal point estimates into your inferences, this tutorial shows you how, using stata.

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Welcome — Research — Teaching — Computing