Welcome

You've reached Dan Pemstein's web site. I'm a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Illinois and a fellow in the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. Previously, I was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. My dissertation examines how inter-institutional information asymmetries affect policy outcomes and legislative politics in the European Union. My other current projects investigate how career ambition and party organization interact to determine legislative behavior and explore the selection processes underlying recorded roll call votes in Parliaments. Additionally, I am a co-author of both the Scythe Statistical Library, an open source C++ library for statistical computation, and RSNL, an R package for the statistical analysis of natural language. Finally, I am 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 preprints and reprints of my publications, copies of my current working papers/presentations, and some data below. Take a look at my CV if you want detail.

(P)reprints

Working Papers and Presentations

Data

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 don't update this section as often as I should, 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