Professor Garrett Glasgow – Parliaments and R

Professor Garrett Glasgow is currently working on a book on parliamentary government formation with two colleagues from Penn State, Matt and Sona Golder.  While his background is in American Politics, Glasgow’s recent line of research with the Golders has been in comparative politics.  Professor Glasgow met the Golders at a conference where they quickly realized that they each had something to offer one another.  Matt and Sona Golder had significant data on European parliamentary governments, including new data on Eastern European countries, and wanted to better understand it and Glasgow had a vast statistical knowledge to apply to the data.  They began working together and to date have published two articles and have one under review.      

Their work, which will culminate in the book, looks at how parliamentary governments are formed.  The parliamentary system differs from the US system in that negotiations occur once officials have been elected to determine which parties will control public policy.  This is not easily determined and must be negotiated.  Specifically, they are looking at what makes governments likely to form and what are the exceptions to the rule.  Professor Glasgow has figured out a statistical way to study this. 

Their research provides a radical shift in how the issue of party formation is studied and analyzed statistically.  The typical way has been to look at each political party as an isolated entity, but Glasgow and the Golders have realized that the reality is more complicated than that.  A party’s chance of being elected is dependent on other parties.  Their approach involves statistically looking at coalitions (every possible combination of parties )instead of parties. 

The book will draw upon their three papers and go further to explore another big observation, which is that in studying government formation, it is necessary to know who is forming the government when trying to analyze and predict trends.  Throughout their work together, Glasgow and the Golders are addressing problems that have been known in the way parliamentary government formation has been studied and understood, and are offering a solution.     

In addition to doing his own research and teaching many of the graduate methods courses, Professor Glasgow has recently started a Meetup group for people interested in discussing and exploring uses of R.  R is a programming language written by statisticians in which users can download prewritten code or write their own code.

Using R both in his personal research and in his graduate methods courses, Glasgow started the group as a way to connect individuals who are learning and using R.  Since the bulk of R is user driven and new codes are continually being written, it is helpful to have a group of people who can come together, talk through projects and problems, help one another problem solve, and point out new tricks and simpler methods.  When everyone is keeping track of a difference piece of the puzzle, having a forum for people to share their piece is very helpful.  It turns out that there was an interest in such a group and after beginning only a few months ago, the group already has 70 members (only half of which are from the UCSB community).   

Garrett Glasgow joined the UCSB Political Science faculty in 2000 after spending one year at the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard University.  His research interests include voting behavior, campaigns and elections, political parties, parliamentary government formation, and research methods for political science.  To learn more about Professor Glasgow, please visit his personal website.