Dear all, Please join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) this Wednesday, September 28 from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in CGIS Knafel Room 354. Arthur Spirling, Assistant Professor at the Department of Government at Harvard University, will present a paper entitled "Partisan Convergence in Executive-Legislative Interactions: Modeling Debates in the House of Commons, 1832-1915". As always, a light lunch will be provided. The abstract for the presentation is: *We consider the interaction between members of the executive and backbenchers in the House of Commons between the Great Reform Act and the Great War, a period of radical internal reform that birthed the Westminster system in its current form. We gather new data of over a million speeches in seventeen thousand debates to model the way in which the cabinet-legislative relationship changed over time. In particular, we conceptualize debates as Markov chains moving between speaker states and focus on estimating transition probabilities of the same. We take a Bayesian mixed model approach, allowing for debate-level and ministry-level variation. We show a remarkable "convergence" in the behavior of ministers from different parties, beginning between the mid-1870s and late-1880s and coinciding with a series of important standing orders relating to the ability to ask questions in the Commons. While Tory ministers generally become more responsive, Liberal ministers are less involved in debate.* An up-to-date schedule for the workshop is available at http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/1208. Best, Konstantin -- Konstantin Kashin Ph.D. Student in Government Harvard University Mobile: 978-844-0538 E-mail: kkashin(a)fas.harvard.edu Site: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~kkashin/