The yearly measures of state ideology and partisanship are now available for others to use.  Look under the Dissertation tab to download the dataset in Stata format.  Or simply download them here.  The codebook is available under the Dissertation tab or here.

These measures are developed in a paper titled "Using National Surveys to Measure Dynamic State Public Opinion: A Guideline for Scholars and An Application", which is based off of Chapter 2 and is currently under review.

Every year (or at least for the past 3 years!) I've been attending the State Politics and Policy Conference.  This year it is at UNC/Duke on May 22-23rd.  It is a great conference, especially for networking, since every participant attends all the panels and there are only 2 panels at a time. 

This year I am presenting a poster, which I've posted below.  I'm starting to get good at creating posters, I think!

Looking forward to a great conference!

And, I get to be in North Carolina for games 2 & 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals.  I've already found a "Steelers bar" to watch the game...LETS GO PENS! :)

SPPC_Poster_portrait.pptx

I will be presenting a paper using Item Response Theory to measure dynamic state public opinion as part of the "New Faces" conference at PSU May 13-14.  Details are on the Quassi website.

This conference allows ABD's to present their methodological work, so its a great opportunity to network prior to the job market.  The paper and presentation are posted below.

Hope to see you there!

Pacheco_New_Faces_Paper2.pdf

I'll be giving a presentation entitled "Using IRT Models to Measure Dynamic State Public Opinion" as part of the Quantitative Social Science Initiative tomorrow in 302 Pond from 12:15-1:30.  There will be free food!

My slides are shown below.

This is the second of my two required presentations as a Quassi Fellow for the 2008-2009 year.  It has been great to take the time to work solely on my methods background this past year with Chris Zorn.  My Quassi project uses Bayesian IRT to measure dynamic public opinion on spending in the states.  The result is a dynamic measure of what state residents want out of their government akin to Stimson's national "policy mood" measure.  I am currently working on the empirical model and validating the measure in a paper.

Using_IRT_To_Measure_State_Public_Opinion2.pdf

Today I participated in the Graduate Student Exhibition.  It is a university event where graduate students create posters to share their research with other students and faculty across the university.  Although it was a looong day (10-6) and I didn't win any awards, I actually had a great time.  My poster is below.

I was situated in between 2 engineers from the EMS college.  Fascinating work, from what I understood of it (which is not much!).  And, there was an interesting project from linguistics across from me where the student found that individuals who have high musical aptitude did better at pronouncing Spanish words compared to those with low musical aptitude.  Because I LOVE the Spanish language and am pretty talented musically, I found this pretty interesting.

Mostly, I learned about how different students tackle important puzzling questions across fields.  But even though we come from different fields, all of us are interested in observing and explaining the world around us.  Scientists (aka nerds) unite! :) 

Better luck next year with the money awards!

jls644_Poster_Grad_Exhibition_alt.pdf

I will be presenting some of my dissertation as part of the American/Comparative Brown Bag Series on Monday, March 23rd from 12:15-1:30 in 302 Pond Lab.

My presentation slides can be found here:

American_Comparative Dissertation Talk2.pdf

Hope to see you there!

My research on political competition and youth voter turnout was recently a topic of discussion on a political science blog, The Monkey Cage.

Take a gander if you are interested:

http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/the_wayback_machine_and_voter.html

Welcome to my first ever blog, launched on Friday the 13th (hope this isn't a bad omen?)

I probably won't be blogging often, but I do have plans to use my blog to update everybody about my research, things that are going on within academia, and point out other interesting things that I may come across.  I am also thinking about using this when I teach my first class this summer, though I am not sure yet. 

One thing this is not is a political blog.  I may post interesting stories from time to time about political science (since this is what I am studying), but this is very different from politics.  I am interested in the study of politics, not the practice of politics, per say.  I am interested in individual differences in political behavior and public opinion, not whether a particular opinion is right or wrong.  So, if you're looking for a political fight, you've come to the wrong place! 

Enjoy and please post comments accordingly!