Research Agenda

My research focuses on how political institutions influence bargaining power. I explore this topic in my dissertation by testing theories of bargaining power at the European Union’s intergovernmental conferences, the quasi-constitutional negotiations where member states make decisions about the EU’s institutions. I examine how the rules governing these negotiations, coupled with the preferences of member state governments and domestic political institutions, affect important bargaining outcomes. With my coauthors, I have examined the influence of institutions over bargaining in other settings, including the recent EU constitutional convention, and in the coalition formation process following the 2005 German election. Generally, my work seeks to combine bargaining theories with new preference data to provide insights into why actors win and lose in negotiations.

My latest work together with Sven-Oliver Proksch examines new ways for estimating preferences from party manifestos and political speech. Preferences are a key ingredient in any empirical work on bargaining. Our project, Wordfish, aims to develop new methodologies for extracting policy positions from political texts, with the hope that researchers can eventually use these new data to improve empirical tests of theoretical bargaining models as well as tests of any other theoretical model which requires data on party ideology.