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Libby Jenke, Ph.D.
ljenke@uh.edu
Assistant Professor
University of Houston
Year of PhD: 2018
City: Houston, Texas
Country: United States
About Me:
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. From 2024-2025, I will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard University. I am additionally a faculty affiliate of the Political Psychology Research Group (PPRG) at Stanford University. My Ph.D. in political science is from Duke University, where I was also a member of Scott Huettel's neuroscience laboratory in Duke's Psychology and Neuroscience department.
I am a quantitative methodologist specializing in causal inference and experimental methods. My work uses eye tracking to obtain direct measures of decision processes, information accrual, and attention. Substantively, I study questions of voter behavior, with an emphasis on candidate choice.
Research Interests
Political Psychology
Experiments
Eye Tracking
Public Opinion
Political Methodology
Publications:
Journal Articles:
This special issue has two aims. First, I highlight recently developed methodological tools that confront challenges involved in identifying causal mechanisms. Scholars often use composite treatments that allow for an efficient design but leave them unable to specify which mechanism is responsible for effects. Another weakness in testing causal mechanisms is that average causal mediation effects rely on strong assumptions that are often known to be false. Second, I include papers that underscore rarely-noted issues with experiments, some of which have solutions and others that remain unsolved. My goal in highlighting these concerns is not to question past work but instead to increase the future scholarly returns of survey experiments.
Canonical rational choice models of voter preferences assume that voters select candidates whose policy positions most closely match their own. Yet, much of the electorate often appears to prioritize identity variables (e.g., social categories, group membership) over policy considerations. Here, we report an empirical test of policy-identity interactions using surveys of likely voters conducted in the 24 hours before the 2016 United States presidential election and the 2018 United States senatorial elections. Each respondent indicated not only their policy preferences but also key social group identities and how those identities would be reinforced by voting. We observed striking evidence for a competition between policy and social group identification: For voters who exhibited the maximal effects of identity, policy positions were essentially irrelevant to their candidate preferences. These results account for dissociations between voters’ stated policy preferences and their voting behavior, while linking empirical observations of political behavior to new models derived from psychology and neuroscience.
Conjoint experiments enjoy increasing popularity in political and social science, but there is a paucity of research on respondents' underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-tracking methodology and a conjoint experiment, administered to a subject pool consisting of university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information when completing conjoint surveys. Our study has two main findings. First, we find a positive correlation between attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data and attribute importance measures based on eye movement. This validation test supports the interpretation of common conjoint metrics, such as Average Marginal Component Effects and marginal R^2 values, as valid measures of attribute importance. Second, when we experimentally increase the number of attributes and profiles in the conjoint table, respondents on average view a larger absolute number of cells but a smaller fraction of the total cells displayed, and the patterns in which they search between cells change conditionally. At the same time, however, their stated choices remain remarkably stable. This overall pattern speaks to the robustness of conjoint experiments and is consistent with a bounded rationality mechanism. Respondents can adapt to complexity by selectively incorporating relevant new information to focus on the important attributes, while ignoring less relevant information to reduce the cognitive processing costs. Together, our results have implications for both the design and interpretation of conjoint experiments.
Canonical rational choice models of voter preferences assume that voters select candidates whose policy positions most closely match their own. Yet, much of the electorate often appears to prioritize identity variables (e.g., social categories, group membership) over policy considerations. Here, we report an empirical test of policy-identity interactions using surveys of likely voters conducted in the 24 hours before the 2016 United States presidential election and the 2018 United States senatorial elections. Each respondent indicated not only their policy preferences but also key social group identities and how those identities would be reinforced by voting. We observed striking evidence for a competition between policy and social group identification: For voters who exhibited the maximal effects of identity, policy positions were essentially irrelevant to their candidate preferences. These results account for dissociations between voters’ stated policy preferences and their voting behavior, while linking empirical observations of political behavior to new models derived from psychology and neuroscience.
In spatial theory a central concept is salience, or the relative importance of issues in a voter’s mind in evaluating candidates’ platforms. Traditional, self-reported measures of salience have either been national in breadth (“which issues are most important to the nation as a whole?”) or personal (“which issues do you care most about personally?”). In the former case, the subjects are being asked to guess what issues other voters think are important; in the latter case, subjects are likely to report issues that are “socially” important to avoid seeming selfish or superficial. Unsurprisingly, such self-reported measures have not been found to explain actual candidate choices by individual voters very well. We introduce a simple process-tracing measure of salience, using mouse-tracking. Experimental participants were asked to rate three hypothetical candidates, using information accessed in a setting where the distribution of attention represents salience in the decision process. Four models were tested: standard city block distance and then the addition of each of the two measures of traditional salience—national and personal—and, finally, the attention distribution measure. Attention distribution improves model ft over the standard distance model and improves classification compared to the traditional salience measures.
Since its establishment in 1963, the Correlates of War (COW) project has sought to build cumulative knowledge about international conflict through the application of the scientific method to the study of militarized interstate behavior. Early analyses from the COW project found substantial variation in the causal model of war across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but COW scholars later sought to develop a general model of war that avoided post hoc historical periodization. We use out of sample cross validation to evaluate the plausibility of assuming temporal homogeneity for statistical models of international conflict that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our results suggest that the causal model of war changes substantially across historical eras. In particular, great care should be taken in generalizing Cold War findings to other historical eras. Our findings demonstrate the importance of exploring temporal variation in the causal model of war.
Voter choice is one of the most important problems in political science. The most common models assume that voting is a rational choice based on policy positions (e.g., key issues) and nonpolicy information (e.g., social identity, personality). Though such models explain macroscopic features of elections, they also reveal important anomalies that have been resistant to explanation. We argue for a new approach that builds upon recent research in cognitive science and neuroscience; specifically, we contend that policy positions and social identities do not combine in merely an additive manner, but compete to determine voter preferences. This model not only explains several key anomalies in voter choice, but also suggests new directions for research in both political science and cognitive science.
Book Chapters:
The “calculus of voting” is the rational-choice based theory of turnout and vote choice that has been at the base of the choice-theoretic studies of campaigns and elections since its first formal statement by Downs (1957) and especially by Riker and Ordeshook (1968). Perhaps because of its initial formal results about turnout that are ordinarily understood to be both pessimistic and empirically wrong, a number of years passed with relatively little theoretical advancement, while theories of voting, political parties, and campaigns and elections developed, often with little to no attention to the voters’ calculus. In this chapter, after a review of the basics of the calculus of voting with respect to turnout, we consider two relatively new theoretical advances: the development of a fully articulated theory of expressive voting; and specification of the (spatial) utility function, to consider a theoretically coherent account of “abstention due to alienation,” and its relationship to the (spatial) account of moral convictions.