Welcome

You've reached Dan Pemstein's web site. I'm a doctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Illinois. My research focuses on the political economy of party systems and the interplay between electoral and legislative institutions and party politics in democracies. My current projects explore the strategic choices parties make when selecting and placing candidates and the role that individual political ambition plays in determining legislative behavior. In addition, I have diverse interests in political methodology, combining a theoretical emphasis on formal modeling and complex systems research with quantitative methods. Finally, 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 project that synthesizes the contributions of other scholars to produce a composite democracy scale, accompanied by estimates of measurement uncertainty.

Research

You can find copies of my current working papers/presentations and some data below. If you're interested in older presentations or published work, take a look at my CV.

Working Papers and Presentations

Datasets

Teaching

I'm not teaching anything at the moment, but here's what I've taught in the past:

Computing

Software

I write a lot of code. This includes statistical software, other research-related code, and some projects that are just for fun. I haven't updated this section in a while and some of this stuff is pretty dated, but C++/Scythe implementations of various Bayesian estimators should end up here eventually.

Snippets

Creative Commons License