Andrew Q. Philips

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Colorado Boulder

Objective The study aims to demonstrate the utility of modeling compositional volatility in substantive domains beyond budgeting. Methods We show how to model compositional volatility on its own or as a part of a system of equations in which the component parts of the compositional outcome variable are also modeled. Results Using data on the vola...

Objective We analyze how economic shocks affect the partisan nature of budgetary trade‐offs and use data from the U.S. Census Annual Survey of Government Finance to illustrate it. Methods We propose a compositional approach to model trade‐offs among 10 budgetary categories across both time and space in U.S. states. Results We find support for the...

Objective This study aims to test whether the American public is polarized and/or parallel in its assessments of the most important problem. Methods We use compositional time series models and new data on public opinion to test for differences between subgroups. Results We find inconsistent evidence of polarization for some issue areas but not ot...

Meta-analyses are used to synthesize a body of literature to produce a single summary estimate as well as to explain differences among studies. The field of political science has slowly gained an appreciation for their use in recent years; however, using meta-analyses in dissertations remains rare. This is puzzling, given the tool’s ability to map...

While governments prefer to alter budgets to fit their ideological stances, the domestic and international contexts can facilitate or constrain behavior. The Politics of Budgets demonstrates when governments do and do not make preferred budgetary changes. It argues for an interconnected view of budgets and explores both the reallocation of expendit...

In Chapter 4, we continue our explanation of tradeoffs between expenditure categories by focusing on how domestic and international contextual factors can constrain or facilitate government budgetary behavior. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globaliza...

In Chapter 3, we focus on explaining the tradeoffs between expenditure categories in government budgets. Rather than explain total expenditures or expenditures in specific policy areas, we argue that the competition for expenditures is in the spending allocations. Governments of varying ideological stances prefer increasing or decreasing spending f...

Government budgets can be complex and contentious. Chapter 1 explains the importance of understanding government budgetary behavior and argues for taking a more realistic view of the process. If governments change part of the budget, then they may need to jostle other budgetary pieces as well. We introduce the broad brushstrokes of our theoretical...

In Chapter 2, we begin with a discussion of the vast literature on political budgeting. We identify three main types of approaches in the extant literature – studies focusing on single budgetary categories, studies of budgetary changes, and studies of aggregate budgetary components. While each of these approaches has provided helpful insights into...

While governments prefer to alter budgets to fit their ideological stances, the domestic and international contexts can facilitate or constrain behavior. The Politics of Budgets demonstrates when governments do and do not make preferred budgetary changes. It argues for an interconnected view of budgets and explores both the reallocation of expendit...

We turn to the larger pieces of the budget in Chapter 5, where we focus on two objectives. First, we ask how the components of the budgets fit together by conducting causality tests for the full range of possible relationships between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility using a panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) model. We fin...

In Chapter 7, we conclude by placing both our theoretical and methodological contributions within the wider world of government decision-making. Our theory begins with the core assumption that government ideology drives the budgetary priorities of governments. With a blank slate, these ideological preferences would steer governments in shaping budg...

Whether domestic and international contexts affect governments’ abilities to alter total expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility is our focus in Chapter 6. We develop expectations about the influence of government ideology and majority status together with contextual factors and other budgetary components on each of our four budg...

Objectives Despite the frequent use of time series models in the social sciences, they have often remained within the confines of assuming purely linear dynamic effects. We contend that many theories involve relationships that are inherently non‐linear. Methods We discuss several approaches to modeling a variety of these types of non‐linear autore...

Quotas have helped women achieve greater numerical representation in government around the world. Yet do they have indirect effects on representation elsewhere? We take advantage of plausibly exogenous variation in when and which states enacted legislation mandating 50% women’s representation in the lowest level of government in India to analyze ho...

Machine learning models, especially ensemble and tree‐based approaches, offer great promise to legislative scholars. However, they are heavily underutilized outside of narrow applications to text and networks. We believe this is because they are difficult to interpret: while the models are extremely flexible, they have been criticized as “black box...

Mummolo and Peterson improve the use and interpretation of fixed-effects models by pointing out that unit intercepts fundamentally reduce the amount of variation of variables in fixed-effects models. Along a similar vein, we make two claims in the context of random effects models. First, we show that potentially large reductions in variation, in th...

Decades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes. This study contributes to the debate using supervised tree-based machine learning to study the relationship between increasing variation in women's legislative representation and the allo...

A flurry of current interest in time series has focused on clarifying equation balance, fractional integration, and cointegration testing. Despite this, a number of recent suggestions may continue to lead scholars toward incorrect inferences. In this comment, I investigate the likelihood of drawing both correct and incorrect inferences under a vari...

Objective To demonstrate how a novel method enhances our understanding of determinants of inequality. Methods We take advantage of recent advances in dynamic models of compositional dependent variables to simultaneously study tradeoffs across multiple slices of the composition of income in the United States between 1947 and 2014. Results Our anal...

In cross-sectional time-series data with a dichotomous dependent variable, failing to account for duration dependence when it exists can lead to faulty inferences. A common solution is to include duration dummies, polynomials, or splines to proxy for duration dependence. Because creating these is not easy for the common practitioner, I introduce a...

Philips, Rutherford, and Whitten (2016, Stata Journal 16: 662–677) introduced dynsimpie, a command to examine dynamic compositional dependent variables. In this article, we present an update to dynsimpie and three new adofiles: cfbplot, effectsplot, and dynsimpiecoef. These updates greatly enhance the range of models that can be estimated and the w...

Does the @realDonaldTrump really matter to financial markets? Research shows that new information about the likely future policy direction of government affects financial markets. In contrast, we argue that new information can also arise about the likely future government's resolve in following through with its policy goals, affecting financial mar...

Globalization has been one of the biggest driving forces of the last half century. There has been substantial disagreement about the impact that increased international integration has on income inequality. Though most agree that globalization positively affects economic output, it is no surprise that it leads to relative winners and losers within...

While the political budget cycle literature focuses on the manipulation of existing policies, an analysis of the impact of the passage of redistributive policies themselves remains absent. I contend that policy passage is a strategically timed signal to voters used before elections to benefit the incumbent. Using aggregate data on land reforms in I...

While the political budget cycle literature focuses on the manipulation of existing policies, an analysis of the impact of the passage of redistributive policies themselves remains absent. I contend that policy passage is a strategically timed signal to voters used before elections to benefit the incumbent. Using aggregate data on land reforms in I...

In this paper we introduce dynamac, a suite of Stata programs designed to assist users in modeling and visualizing the effects of autoregressive distributed lag models, as well as testing for cointegration. We discuss the bounds cointegration test proposed by Pesaran, Shin and Smith (2001), which we have adapted into a Stata program. Since the resu...

One potential consequence of increasing women’s numeric representation is that women elected officials will behave differently than their men counterparts and improve women’s substantive representation. This study examines whether electing women to local offices changes how local government expenditures are allocated in ways that benefit women. Usi...

Across a broad range of fields in political science, there are many theoretically interesting dependent variables that can be characterized as compositions. We build on recent work that has developed strategies for modeling variation in such variables over time by extending them to models of time series cross sectional data. We discuss how research...

Although recent articles have stressed the importance of testing for unit roots and cointegration in time-series analysis, practitioners have been left without a straightforward procedure to implement this advice. I propose using the autoregressive distributed lag model and bounds cointegration test as an approach to dealing with some of the most c...

What affects government policy-making continues to be an important question for researchers interested in political competition and policy priorities. In this contribution, we bring together a theoretical framework that focuses on the influence of globalizing forces on government policy decisions with a methodological emphasis on explaining dynamic...

Despite a vast number of articles, the political budget cycle literature contains many conflicting theories and empirical results. I conduct the first ever meta-analysis of this literature in order to establish whether a link between elections and government budgets exists. Using data on 1198 estimates across 88 studies published between 2000 and 2...

In this article, we adapt the modeling strategy proposed by Philips, Rutherford, and Whitten (2016, American Journal of Political Science 60: 268–283) and create a user-friendly Stata command, dynsimpie. This command requires the installation of the clarify package of Tomz, Wittenberg, and King (2003, Journal of Statistical Software 8(1): 1–30) and...

The substance of politics involves competition that evolves over time. While our theories about competition emphasize trade-offs across multiple categories, most empirical models tend to oversimplify them by considering trade-offs between one category and everything else. We propose a research strategy for testing theories about trade-off relations...

When teams of rival politicians compete for public support, they are essentially playing a zero sum game where one party's gains tend to come from the losses of one or more of their opponents. Despite this, most analyses of party support across time model the dynamics associated with a single party's support. In nations where only two parties are c...