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.