W-NOMINATE and the Constitutional Convention of 1787

In my paper “Ideology and Participation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787,” I talk about the replication of W-NOMINATE scores for delegates at the Federal Convention of 1787.  Delegate W-NOMINATE scores were originally computed  by Jac C. Heckelman and Keith Dougherty in “A Spatial Analysis of Delegate Voting at the Constitutional Convention” (2013)  based on work outlined here, here, and here using the W-NOMINATE Program developed by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal (for more on W-NOMINATE, see The W-NOMINATE Program).   However, Heckelman and Dougherty do not provide replication code and NOMINATE is particular to implement.  I have provided a walk-through on how to compute the delegate W-NOMINATE scores which is available for download here.

The U.S. Appeals Courts Database

In “The Beliefs and Behaviors of Appellate Court Judges,” Doug M. Johnson and I use the Songer U.S. Appeals Courts Database to generate judge-case observations for our analysis. “Creating Judge-Case Observations from the Songer Court of Appeals Database” details how this is done.  “CoAJudgeCaseCreation.R” provides a R file to execute the data transformation.

Code for the other projects mentioned here are available on my GitHub at github.com/DavidAGelman.