Methods

Political science is in large part the study of power, but power itself is difficult to measure. We argue that we can use newspaper coverage &mdash in particular, the relative amount of space devoted to particular subjects in newspapers &mdash to measure the relative power of an important set of political actors and offices.

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is popular because it provides a design-based estimate of the incumbency advantage. However, the RD estimate is “local”- it only identifies the effect in hypothetical elections with a 50-50 tie between the …

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is a valuable tool for identifying electoral effects, but this design is only effective when relevant actors do not have precise control over election results. Several recent papers contend that such precise …