Matt's Page

Matt Golder

Department of Political Science, Florida State University

Contact Info:

Matt Golder
Department of Political Science
Florida State University
569 Bellamy Building
113 Collegiate Loop
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230

email: mgolder@fsu.edu

phone: (850) 644-7302
fax: (850) 644-1367

Research
Teaching 
Links


Curriculum Vitae


Academic Experience

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Florida State University (Fall 2005-current)

Instructor, Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection (2008)

Associate Scholar, Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models, UCLA (2007)

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, Macro Variables Committee (2005-current)

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa (2004-2005)


Education

Ph.D. 2004. Department of Politics, New York University

M.A. 1999. Institute of French Studies, New York University
M.Phil. 1997. European Politics and Society, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University
B.A. Hons. 1995. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University


Other Education

Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models, University of Michigan, 2003
Graduate Workshop in Computational Modeling and Complexity, Santa Fe Institute, 2003


Research

Matt Golder's Dataverse

Publications:

2008. William Clark, Matt Golder & Sona Golder. Principles of Comparative Politics. Washington D.C.: CQ Press.
[Advance Praise][Chapter 1 - Introduction][Chapter 2 - What is Science?]


2007. Thomas Brambor, William Clark & Matt Golder. "Are African Party Systems Different?" Electoral Studies 26: 315-323.
[replication materials]

2006. Matt Golder. "Presidential Coattails and Legislative Fragmentation." American Journal of Political Science 50: 34-48.
[replication materials]

2006. William Clark & Matt Golder. "Rehabilitating Duverger's Theory: Testing the Mechanical and Strategic Modifying Effects of Electoral Laws." Comparative Political Studies 39: 679-708.
[replication materials]

  • An earlier version of this paper was nominated for the Robert H. Durr Award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem in political science at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2003.

2006. Thomas Brambor, William Clark & Matt Golder. "Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses." Political Analysis 14: 63-82.
[webpage][presentation]

  • Reprinted in W. Paul Vogt. 2008. Selecting Research Methods. London: Sage Publications.

2006. William Clark, Michael Gilligan & Matt Golder. "A Simple Multivariate Test for Asymmetric Hypotheses." Political Analysis 14: 311-331.
[replication materials]

2005. Matt Golder. "Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946-2000." Electoral Studies. 24: 103-121.
[webpage]

2004. Matt Golder& Leonard Wantchekon. "Africa: Dictatorial and Democratic Electoral Systems since 1946." In Josep Colomer. ed. Handbook of Electoral System Choice. London: Palgrave.

2003. Matt Golder. "Explaining Variation in the Electoral Success of Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe." Comparative Political Studies. 36: 432-466.
[replication materials]

2003. Matt Golder. "Electoral Institutions, Unemployment and Extreme Right Parties: A Correction." British Journal of Political Science. 33: 525-534.
[replication materials]

2002. William Clark, Matt Golder & Sona Golder. "Fiscal Policy and the Democratic Process in the European Union." European Union Politics. 3: 205-230.
[replication materials]

Under Review:

"Ideological Congruence and Electoral Institutions: Conceptualization and Measurement" (with Jacek Stramski).

  • Revise and resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science.

"The Balance of Power Between Citizens and the State: Democratization and the Resource Curse" (with William Clark & Sona Golder).

  • Revise and resubmit at the British Journal of Political Science.
  • An earlier version of this paper was nominated for the best paper in the Comparative Democratization Section at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2006.

"Making Electoral Democracy Work: Voters, Parties, and the Rules of the Game." Grant Proposal with Andre Blais et al. (Canadian $2.5 million).

Grants Received:

"Evaluating Democratic Performance." Co-PI on a grant to Council on Research and Creativity at Florida State University ($125,000).

"Making Electoral Democracy Work: Voters, Parties, and the Rules of the Game." Executive board member on preliminary grant proposal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Canadian $20,000).

Manuscripts, Grants, and Work in Progress:

"Empirically Modeling the Government Formation Process" (with Garett Glasgow & Sona Golder).

"Formateur Selection: What Determines the Choice of Prime Minister?" (with Garett Glasgow & Sona Golder).

"Modernization Theory Meets the Difficult Combination: Institutions, Economic Development and Democratic Stability" (with William Clark & Sona Golder).

"Religion, Societal Development, and Political Attitudes" (with Ben Gaskins).

"Party Motivations and Platform Choice under Proportional Representation Electoral Rules" (with Sona Golder & David Siegel).

"Experiments in Strategic Voting." Grant proposal with Jens Grosser.

"The Conditional Effect of Wealth on Democracy" (with William Clark & Paul Poast).

"Electoral Institutions and Voter Choice" (with Jun Koga).

"Institutional Choice Under Dictatorship" (with Jeffrey K. Staton).

"Democratic Survival: Matching Parliamentary and Presidential Regimes" (with Sona Golder & Christopher Reenock).

"Clarifying CLARIFY: Thinking about Point Estimates" (with Andreas Beger).


Teaching

Department of Political Science, Florida State University

Graduate

Introduction to Duration Models (2008)

The course introduces students to duration models. These models are sometimes referred to as survival or event history models. The goal of these models is to analyze the duration of time until some event happens. The event in question might be something like the collapse of a government, the onset of war, the emergence of democracy, the adoption of a policy, the loss of a job, and so on. The course is divided into three main sections: (a) continuous time duration models, (b) discrete time duration models, and (c) advanced topics in duration models.

POS 5747: Quantitative Methods IV (2006, 2007)

The course begins with a theoretical discussion of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). We then turn to specific applications of MLE. We start with binary response models (logit, probit, scobit, heterskedastic probit etc.), ordered response models (ordered probit/logit, generalized logit), unordered response models (multinomial logit, conditional logit, multinomial probit etc.), and event count models (poisson, negative binomial, ZIP models etc.). We then focus on continuous time duration models (parametric and semi-parametric), discrete time duration models, and more advanced duration topics (competing risks, frailty models, repeated events etc.) Next, we deal with truncated and censored data (tobit, heckman models, bivariate probit, bivariate probit with partial observability, bivariate probit with selection etc.) We also take a quick look at matching techniques. In the remaining time, we will examine other models, not all of which employ maximum likelihood. For example, we will look at time series models dealing with stationary and non-stationary data. We will also look at models dealing with panel and time-series cross-sectional data.

POS 5091: Core Seminar in Comparative Politics
[2007] [2008]

This course is the core seminar for the field of comparative politics in the political science Ph.D. program. It provides an introduction to the dominant questions, theories, and empirical research in comparative politics. The course will focus primarily on cross-national comparisons with the goal of explaining some of the systematic relationships that exist between social, economic, and political variables around the world. The course will not be an in-depth study of 3 or 4 countries (although you will get country-specific knowledge). The universe of cases will be all the countries in the world. The course is unapologetically scientific. It treats epistemological debates quite seriously and makes the argument that to behave scientifically is nothing more nor less than to adopt scholarly practices that invite falsification. I will try to convince you that formulating knowledge about politics in a manner that invites falsification is both intellectually persuasive and normatively satisfying. The substantive topics covered in the class include democracy and development, democratic performance, dictatorial rule, political institutions, culture and identity issues, civil war, elections and political parties, representation and accountability, and political economy.

Undergraduate

CPO 3930, CPO 3103: Government and Politics of Europe
[2007][2008]

This is an upper-level Comparative Politics course that applies the basic concepts of comparative political science to the political systems of Europe. Its goal is to illustrate and explain some of the systematic relationships that exist between certain social, economic and political variables in European countries. As a result, the course will NOT be an in-depth study of 3 or 4 European countries (although you will get country-specific knowledge). In addition to comparisons within Europe (East and West), we will compare European political systems to other advanced democratic nations around the world. We will discuss theories of voting, the development of party systems, political protests, transitions to democracy, the choice of political institutions, immigration policy, democratic performance and several other topics.The course is divided into two sections. In Section I, we focus on the historical development of political systems in Europe since the 1920s. We apply the tools of political science to better understand historical events such as the rise of Nazism, the onset of the Cold War, the establishment of the post-war party system, the transitions to democracy in Southern Europe, and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Having obtained an overview of the historical evolution of Europe's political systems, we then turn to an examination of contemporary European institutions and their effects in Section II. We will build on the introduction to different types of democratic institutions that you had in CPO2002, and reconsider the relationship between political actors in light of a principal-agent framework.


CPO 2002: Introduction to Comparative Political Science (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008)

This course introduces students to the study of comparative political science. The course will focus on cross-national comparisons with the goal of explaining some of the systematic relationships that exist between social, economic, and political variables around the world. The course will not be an in-depth study of 3 or 4 countries (although you will get country-specific knowledge). The universe of cases will be all the countries in the world. The course is divided into four sections. The first section briefly examines what we mean by the scientific study of comparative politics. We ask questions such as (i) What is comparative political science? (ii) What is science? and (iii) What is politics? The second section compares democracies and dictatorships. We ask questions such as (i) What is the state? (ii) Why are some states democratic but others authoritarian? (iii) What do we mean by democracy and how can we measure it? (iv) How can we explain transitions to democracy? (v) Why do some dictatorships have elections, parties, and parliaments? and (vi) Do democratic states systematically produce different outcomes such as higher economic growth, better health and more education? The third section focuses purely on democracies and examines the different institutional forms that they can take. We ask questions such as (i) What are the differences between parliamentary and presidential democracies? (ii) What are the different types of governments and how do they form? (iii) What is a minority government and why do they exist? (iv) How do different countries elect their representatives and does it matter? (v) Why do some countries have many parties while others have few? (vi) Why are ethnic cleavages politicized in some countries but not others? (vii) Why is policy change difficult and incremental in some countries but not in others? The final section of the course examines how the different varieties of democracy affect things like representation, performance, and democratic stability. The course will provide you with simple methodological tools for analyzing these questions. For example, you will learn to solve logic problems, employ simple game-theoretic models, and interpret regression results.

Department of Political Science, University of Iowa

Undergraduate

Government and Politics of Europe (2004, 2005)
Institutional Approaches to Democracy and Dictatorship (2004)
Introduction to the Politics of the Industrialized Democracies (2005)

Department of Politics, New York University (Teaching Assistant)

Graduate

Quantitative Methods II (Graduate), Professor Nathaniel Beck, (2004) - Description
Quantitative Methods II (Graduate), Professors Jonathan Nagler, Sanford Gordon, Michael Gilligan and Alastair Smith, (2003)
Quantitative Methods I (Graduate), Professor Jonathan Nagler, (2003)

Undergraduate

Power and Politics in America, Professor Rebecca Morton (2002)
International Politics, Professor Michael Gilligan (2001)
Comparative Politics, Professor William Clark (2001)
Power and Politics in America, Professor Anna Harvey (2000)
International Politics, Professor Michael Gilligan (2000)
Doing Political Science, Professor Anna Harvey (2000)
Theories of War and Peace, Professor Michael Gilligan (1999)

St. Edmund Hall, Oxford Univeristy (Tutor)

Comparative Politics (Undergraduate) (1996)
Government and Politics of Western Europe (1996)

Links

Last edited:  May 20, 2008