Arthur Spirling
Fisher Hall, Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
http://arthurspirling.org

updated: August 15, 2024
609-258-6237
arthur.spirling@princeton.edu

PositionPrinceton University
Class of 1987 Professor of Politics
Director of Graduate Studies of Politics

Princeton, NJ
2023–current
2024–current

New York University
Professor of Politics and Data Science
Associate Professor of Politics and Data Science
Department of Politics, Center for Data Science (tenured)

New York, NY
2019–2023
2015–2019

Chair, Steering Committee, Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment
Chair, Education Working Group, Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment
Deputy Director and Director of Graduate Studies (MSDS) of the Center for Data Science
Harvard University
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Department of Government (untenured)2018–2022
2015–2022
2016–2022
Cambridge, MA
2012–2015

Assistant Professor, Department of Government
Director, Program on Text Research (IQSS)

2008–20122009–2015

Education
University of Rochester
PhD, Political Science
Fields: Methods, Comparative Politics
Interests: GLM, applied Bayesian statistics, ideal point estimation

Rochester, NYApril, 2008

Oxford University
Nuffield College, DPhil student in Politics

Oxford, United Kingdom
2001–2003

London School of Economics
MSc Public Administration and Public Policy (Distinction)
BSc Government and Economics (1st Class Honors)

London, United Kingdom
2000–2001
1997–2000

Prizes and Honors
 Golden Dozen Teaching Award (2019, one of 12 winners) from College of Arts and Sciences at NYU which“recognizes faculty for their outstanding contribution to learning in the classroom.” Society for Political Methodology Emerging Scholar Award (2018), which “honors a young researcher,within ten years of their degree, who is making notable contributions to the field of Political Methodology”
 Roslyn Abramson Award for “excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates”, awarded by Harvard
College (one of two winners), 2014.
 Emerging Scholars Best Paper award, European Political Science Association, 2013.
 Clark award for research, from Dean of FAS, Harvard University, 2012.
 Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award, awarded by Harvard University’s Graduate
Student Council (one of four winners, 104 nominees), 2012.
 John T. Williams prize, awarded by the Society for Political Methodology for best dissertation prospectus,
2007.

Grant Activity Steering committee chair/member for Moore Sloan Data Science Environment: grant total of $37.8M(with UC Berkeley and University of Washington), of which $12.6M to be spent at NYU (2014–2019)
 Co-PI for NRT-HDR: FUTURE Foundations, Translation, and Responsibility for Data Science
Impact from the National Science Foundation. Total of $3,000,000 (award #1922658) (2019–2024)
 Principal investigator for Computational and Historical Resources on Nations and Organizations for
the Social Sciences (CHRONOS) from the National Science Foundation, collaboration with Columbia
University: total of $749,615 of which $269,127 to be spent at NYU (awards #1637159 and #1637108)(2016–2019)

Professional Service
 President of Society for Political Methodlogy, head of APSA Section 10. (July 2024–current) Advisory/Executive Panel Member, Princeton Language and Intelligence, Princeton Data Driven SocialScience, LSE Data Science Institute.
 Advisory Panel Member, National Science Foundation, Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics (MMS).
2020–2021.
 Host/Co-organizer, ‘New Directions in Text Analysis’ conference, 2010, ’11, ’12, ’13, ’14, ’15. WeatherheadWestminster Systems Conference, 2013.
 Reviewer, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal ofPolitical Science (Editorial board), Canadian Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Economicsand Politics, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, European Political Science Review,Government and Opposition, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal ofthe American Statistical Association, Journal of Politics, Journal of Social and Political Psychology,
International Organization, Legislative Studies Quarterly (Editorial Board), Parliamentary Affairs, PoliticalAnalysis (Editorial board), Political Communication, Political Research Quarterly, Political Science Researchand Methods (Editorial board), Politics & Policy, Public Choice, Public Opinion Quarterly, Social Networks,World Politics.
 Managing Contributor/Editor for the Special Issue on British Political Development at Legislative StudiesQuarterly (Fall 2014).
 Director of the ‘Text as Data Association’ (professional association, founded 2015), 2015–2018
 Chair of the Gabriel A. Almond prize committee (American Political Science Association, 2016)

Refereed Publications
36. Measuring Distances in High Dimensional Spaces Why Average Group Vector Comparisons Exhibit Bias, And
What to Do About it. Political Analysis, accepted for publication. with Breanna Green, William Hobbs, Sofia
Avila, Pedro Rodriguez, Brandon M. Stewart
35. What Good is a Regression? Inference to the Best Explanation and the Practice of Political Science Research.
Journal of Politics, accepted for publication.with Brandon Stewart.
34. Large Language Models Can Argue in Convincing Ways About Politics, But Humans Dislike AI Authors:
implications for Governance. Political Science (https://doi.org/10.1080/00323187.2024.2335471)) with
Alexis Palmer
33. Multilanguage Word Embeddings For Social Science: Estimation, Inference and Validation Resources for 157
Languages. Political Analysis, accepted for publication with Pedro Rodriguez, Brandon Stewart and Elisa
Wirsching.
32. Embedding Regression: Models for Context-Specific Description and Inference. American Political Science
Review (2023). with Pedro Rodriguez and Brandon Stewart
31. Word Embeddings: What works, what doesn’t, and how to tell the difference for applied research. Journal ofPolitics, Volume 84, Issue 1, 101–115 (2022). with Pedro Rodriguez
30. Turning History into Data: Data Collection, Measurement, and Inference in HPE. Journal of Historical
Political Economy, Volume 1, Issue 1, 127-154 (2021). with Alexandra Cirone
29. Understanding Agency Incentives in Intelligence Failures: A Text-as-Data Analysis of the Iranian Revolution.
Intelligence and National Security, Volume 36, Issue 6, 781–806 (2021). With Matthew J. Connelly, RaymondHicks and Robert Jervis

28. Diplomatic Documents Data for International Relations: The Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive)
Database. Conflict Management and Peace Science, Volume 38, issue 6, 762–781. With Matthew J. Connelly,
Raymond Hicks, Robert Jervis and Clara H. Suong
27. A General Model of Author “Style” with Application to the UK House of Commons, 1935–2018. Political
Analysis, Volume 28, Issue 3: 412-434 (2020). with Leslie Huang and Patrick O Perry.
26. Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication Through Textual Complexity. American Journal of PoliticalScience, Volume 63, Issue 2: 491–508. With Ken Benoit and Kevin Munger
25. Conditional Word Embedding and Hypothesis Testing via Bayes-by-Backprop. Proceedings of EMNLP, 2018.
With Kyunghyun Cho, Rujun Han and Michael Gill
24. Text Preprocessing For Unsupervised Learning: Why It Matters, When It Misleads, And What To Do About It
Political Analysis, Volume 26, Issue 2: 168–189 with Matthew Denny.
23. The Shadow Cabinet in Westminster Systems: Modeling Opposition Agenda Setting in the House of Commons,1832–1915, British Journal of Political Science, Volume 48, Issue 2: 343–368, with Andrew Eggers.
22. Classification Accuracy as a Substantive Quantity of Interest: Measuring Polarization in Westminster Systems.
Political Analysis, Volume 26, Issue 1: 120-128 (2018) with Andrew Peterson.
21. Asking Too Much? The Rhetorical Role of Questions in Political Discourse. Proceedings of EMNLP, 2017.
With Justine Zhang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil.
20. Incumbency effects and the strength of party preferences: evidence from multiparty elections in the United
Kingdom. Journal of Politics, Vol 79, no. 3: 903-920 with Andrew Eggers.
19. Party Cohesion in Westminster Systems: Inducements, Replacement and Discipline in the House of Commons,1836–1910. British Journal of Political Science Vol 46, No 3, 567–589 (2016). with Andrew Eggers
18. Democratization and Linguistic Complexity: The Effect of Franchise Extension on Parliamentary Discourse,1832–1915, Journal of Politics, 78(1): 120–136.
17. Estimating the Severity of the WikiLeaks US Diplomatic Cables Disclosure. Political Analysis, 23(2):299-305(2015), with Michael Gill
16. Modeling ‘Effectiveness’ in International Relations. Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol 52 (2), 207–238 (2015),
with Jonathan Renshon
15. British Political Development: A Research Agenda. Introduction to the Special Issue. Legislative Studies
Quarterly, Vol 9, No 4, 435–437 (2014).
14. Electoral Security as a Determinant of Legislator Activity, 1832–1918: New Data and Methods for Analyzing
British Political Development. Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol 9, No 4, 593–620 with Andrew Eggers.
13. Ministerial Responsiveness in Westminster Systems: Institutional Choices and House of Commons Debate,1832–1915. American Journal of Political Science, Vol 58, 873–887, with Andrew Eggers
12. Guarding the Guardians Legislative Self-Policing and Electoral Corruption in Victorian Britain. Quarterly
Journal of Political Science, 9, no. 3 (2014): 337–370, with Andrew Eggers
11. Radical Moderation: Recapturing Power in Two-party Parliamentary Systems. American Journal of Political
Science, Vol 56, No 2, 413–432 with Tasos Kalandrakis.
10. US Treaty-making with American Indians: Institutional Change and Relative Power, 1784–1911. American
Journal of Political Science, Vol 56, No 1, 84–97.
9. Testing the Power of Arguments in Political Science: A Bradley-Terry Approach. Electoral Studies, Vol 31, No
1, 212–221, with Peter Loewen and Daniel Rubenson.
8. Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies. American Political Science
Review, Vol 105, No 2, 337–358 with Torun Dewan.
7. Scaling the Critics: Uncovering the Latent Dimensions of Movie Criticism with An Item Response Approach.
Journal of the American Statistical Association, 105 (489), with Michael Peress.
6. Identifying Intra-Party Voting Blocs in the UK House of Commons. Journal of the American StatisticalAssociation, 105 (490), With Kevin Quinn.
5. ‘Turning Points’ in Iraq: Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Political Science. The American
Statistician, 61:4, 2007.
4. Bayesian Approaches for Limited Dependent Variable Change Point Problems. Political Analysis, 15(4), 2007.
3. UK OC OK? Interpreting Optimal Classification Scores for the U.K. House of Commons. Political Analysis,15(1), 2007, with Iain McLean.

2. Under the Influence? Intellectual Exchange in Political Science. PS: Political Science and Politics. With David
Carter, 41(2), 2007.
1. None of the above: The UK House of Commons votes on reforming the House of Lords, 2003. The Political
Quarterly, 74, 298–310. With Iain McLean and Meg Russell.

Other Academic Output: Notes, Comments, Miscellany
9. “Using proprietary language models in academic research requires explicit justification” Nature ComputationalScience (2023) https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00585-1 With Alexis Palmer and Noah A Smith.
8. “Open generative AI models are a way forward for science” Nature (World View). Vol 616, April 2023, p413.
7. “Dumbing Down? Trends in the Complexity of Political Communication” Chapter 9 of “Can America Govern
Itself ?” Frances E Lee and Nolan McCarty (Eds), Cambridge University Press, 2019 With Kenneth Benoit andKevin Munger
6. Response to “Statistical modelling of citation exchange between statistics journals” by Varin, C, Cattelan, Mand Firth, D. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 179(1): 56–57.
5. “Comment” [on “Political Polarization and the Dynamics of Political Language: Evidence from 130 Years ofPartisan Speech”]. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2012.
4. tapiR and The Public Whip: Resources for Westminster Voting. The Political Methodologist 14(2), with David
Firth.
3. International Encyclopedia of Political Science. (Contributor.)
Sage (2011). Bertrand Badie, Dirk Berg-Schlosser and Leonardo Morlino (eds.)
2. Encyclopedia of Power. (Contributor.)
Sage (2010). Keith Dowding and Nick Miller (eds.)
1. The Rights and Wrongs of Roll Calls. Government and Opposition 41(4), 561–568, (2006) with Iain McLean.

In Progress
3. Replication for Large Language Models
Problems, Principles, and Best Practice for Political Science with Christopher Barrie and Lexi Palmer
2. Model Complexity for Supervised Learning: Why Simple Models Almost Always Work Best, And Why It
Matters for Applied Research with Marco Morucci
1. The Levellers in Context: Equals, Peers and Free-born Englishmen. with Melissa Schwartzberg

Teaching
UG, Harvard Gov 98 (Junior Seminar, Fall ’08,’09, ’10) Voters, Parties and Elections in Comparative Perspective. Gov 50(Spring ’09,’10,’11, Fall ’12, 13): Introduction to Political Science Research Methods. Gov 61: Research
Practice in Quantitative Methods (Spring ’13).
Grad, Harvard Gov 2002 (Spring ’11, Fall ’11,’12, ’13): Topics in Political Methodology
UG, NYU POL 800 (Fall ‘16), 850 (Fall ‘17, ‘18), DS 111 (Fall ‘19, ‘20, ’21)
Grad, NYU ‘Dissertation Seminar’ (Fall, 16). ‘Text as Data’ (Spring ’16, ‘17, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21, ‘23). ‘Intro Data Science’(MS) (Spring ‘17), ‘Intro Data Science (PhD) (Fall ‘20, ‘21),

Grad, Princeton ‘Text as Data’ (Fall, ’23)

Software tapiR : Tools for Accessing Parliamentary Information in R. Designed with David Firth.
 preText: Diagnostics to Assess the Effects of Text Preprocessing Decisions. Designed with Matthew Denny.
 stylest: R package for estimating speaker style distinctiveness in texts. Designed with Leslie Huang and Patrick
O Perry.
 sophistication: R package associated with Benoit, Munger and Spirling paper(s) on textual complexity
 conText: R package associated with Rodriguez, Spirling and Stewart paper(s) on embedding regressions