Replication data for: A Reassessment of 'The Methods behind the Madness: Presidential Electoral College Strategies, 1988-1996'

Daron Shaw (1999) offers evidence for the predictable and systematic effects of campaign strategy. This article has influenced other scholars who rely on its findings in support of key assumptions about the strategic behavior of presidential candidates (Damore 2002; Heppen 2001; Prior 2001; Stoker and Bowers 2002). To conclude that candidates form campaign strategy based on predictable factors such as competitiveness, electoral vote share, and the cost of TV advertisements, Shaw (1999) claims to use \"ordered probit\" (1999, 906) instead of least-squares regression (LS) to avoid familiar problems with ordinal dependent variables. Then, to conclude that electoral college strategy is a strong exogenous predictor of campaign resource allocation, Shaw claims to use \"two-stage least squares (2SLS)\" (1999, 907) to avoid problems with endogeneity bias. Attempting to replicate Shaw's (1999) results, we discover that both analyses are actually LS regressions presented as if they were ordinal probit and 2SLS. When we perform ordinal probit and 2SLS analyses, all substantive findings in Shaw (1999) vanish.达伦·肖（Daron Shaw）1999年的研究为竞选策略的可预测且系统性影响提供了实证依据。该文章对后续学者产生了深远影响，诸多研究者援引其发现，用以支撑关于总统候选人策略性行为的核心假设（Damore 2002; Heppen 2001; Prior 2001; Stoker and Bowers 2002）。为得出"候选人会基于竞选竞争力、选举人票得票率、电视广告成本等可预测因素制定竞选策略"这一结论，肖（1999）声称其采用了有序Probit模型（ordered probit）而非最小二乘回归（least-squares regression, LS），以规避序数因变量常见的建模问题。随后，为证明选举人团策略是竞选资源分配的强外生预测因子，肖称其使用了两阶段最小二乘法（two-stage least squares, 2SLS），以解决内生性偏误问题。在尝试复刻肖（1999）的研究结果时，我们发现两项分析实则均以最小二乘回归的形式呈现，却被伪装成有序Probit与两阶段最小二乘法。当我们实际执行有序Probit与两阶段最小二乘分析后，肖（1999）中的所有实质性研究结论均不复存在。