Professor Benjamin Lauderdale

Biography

I am a Professor of Political Science at University College London. From 2011-2018 I was on the faculty at the London School of Economics. I have been a Senior Data Science Advisor to YouGov since 2016 and was previously an Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review (2016-2020).

Research

My research is focused on the measurement of political preferences from survey, voting, network and text data. Applications of these methods have included citizens, legislators and judges in the US, UK and EU.

Selected publications:

• Deborah Beim, Tom S Clark and Benjamin E Lauderdale. “Republican-Majority Appellate Panels Increase Execution Rates for Capital Defendants” forthcoming, Journal of Politics
• Chris Hanretty, Benjamin E Lauderdale and Nick Vivyan. “A Choice-Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate” American Journal of Political Science, 2020.
• Benjamin E Lauderdale, Chris Hanretty and Nick Vivyan. “Decomposing
• Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy and Instability” Journal of Politics, 2018.
• Jack Blumenau and Benjamin E Lauderdale. “Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Agenda Setting and Legislative Voting in Response to the EU Crisis” Journal of Politics, 2018
• Benjamin E Lauderdale and Tom S Clark. “Estimating Vote-Specific Preferences from Roll-Call Data using Conditional Autoregressive Priors.” Journal of Politics, 2016.
• Kenneth Benoit, Drew Conway, Benjamin E Lauderdale, Michael Laver and Slava Mikhaylov. “Crowd-Sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data” American Political Science Review, 2016.
• Benjamin E Lauderdale and Tom S Clark. “Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes.” American Journal of Political Science, 2014.
• Benjamin E Lauderdale and Tom S Clark. “The Supreme Court’s Many Median Justices” American Political Science Review, 2012.
• Tom S Clark and Benjamin E Lauderdale. “Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space” American Journal of Political Science, 2010.

For a full list of publications and replication data, see my personal website.

Teaching

In 2020-21, I will be teaching quantitative measurement at the undergraduate level, introductory quantitative methods at the postgraduate level, and political behaviour at the postgraduate level.

I am interested in supervising PhD students who want to work on improving measurement in political science, particularly in the areas of political behaviour and representation.