MacMillan-CSAP Workshop on Quantitative Research Methods: Betsy Sinclair, WUSTL

Event time: 
Thursday, February 6, 2014 - 5:00pm through 6:15pm
Event description: 

Betsy Sinclair

Associate Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis

“Estimating the Electoral Connection”

Summary: Do constituents reward their elected representatives for their activity while in office?  We evaluate this relationship in the context of the 93rd-112th sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives using an instrumental variable (office proximity to leaders), strengthen this relationship (by design), and compare these results to the subset of data where representatives participate in a lottery to determine office location.

Betsy Sinclair is an Associate Professor in political science at Washington University in St Louis. Her research interests are located in American politics and political methodology with an emphasis on individual political behavior. Her focus is on the social foundations of participatory democracy – the ways in which social networks influence voting, donating, choosing a candidate or identifying with a particular party. Professor Sinclair’s other interests are broadly defined as those involving voting and elections and range from evaluating the consequences of different voting technologies to developing techniques to draw additional causal inferences in randomized field experiments.