Dear Applied Statistics Community, Please join us this Wednesday, October 29th, when Michael Kellerman, PhD Candidate in the Department of Government, will present his work on "Electoral Punishment as Signaling in Subnational Elections". Mike provided the following abstract, It is a well-established empirical regularity that parties in federal office suffer setbacks in state-level elections. Many authors attribute this to a desire on the part of voters to balance the policy preferences of the federal incumbent. In this paper, I consider an alternative explanation with a long tradition in the literature: voters punish the party of the federal incumbent in state elections in order to send a signal to the federal government. I construct a simple signaling model to formalize this intuition, which predicts that under most circumstances signaling can occur at only one level of government. I estimate a statistical model allowing for electoral punishment using data from German elections and find support for punishment at the state level, rather than the punishment at both levels implied by balancing theories. Mike also provided a copy of his paper, available here: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~kellerm/balsig.pdf The applied statistics workshop meets each Wednesday in room K-354 CGIS-Knafel, 1737 Cambridge St, Cambridge MA. The workshop convenes at 12 noon with a light-lunch, presentations usually begin around 1215 and conclude by 130 pm. As always, everyone is welcome! Cheers Justin Grimmer