About

Guy D. Whitten is a Professor and the Department Head for Political Science at the Bush School of Public Policy & Public Service at Texas A&M University. He holds the Bob Bullock Chair in Public Policy and Finance. His primary research and teaching interests include comparative public policy, political economy, and political methodology. Much of his published research involves cross-national comparative studies of the influence of economics on government popularity and elections. Recently, his work has focused on political budgeting, exemplified by his book titled The Politics of Budgets: Getting a Piece of the Pie, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Dr. Whitten has also contributed significantly to the social sciences through influential works on the use of statistics for inference, including co-authoring a textbook titled The Fundamentals of Political Science Research. He is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Methodological Tools in the Social Sciences and serves on the editorial boards of Political Analysis and Political Science and Research Methods. Additionally, he is a frequent instructor of short courses on statistical methods for social scientists at international universities and research centers. Prior to his current position, Dr. Whitten was a Research Associate at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Rochester, where he double-majored in Political Science and History, and specialized in Comparative Politics, American Politics, and Quantitative Methods during his doctoral studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Management science
• Economic growth
• Statistical physics
• Econometrics
• Social psychology
• Virology
• Development economics
• Remote sensing
• Public administration
• Law
• Geography
• Statistics
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Medicine
• Data science
• Physics
• Engineering
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• The Answer Was There All Along: Worry About the Dynamics!

  The Journal of Politics · 2025-04-03 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Coalition as a heuristic: voters’ perceptions of party positions in presidential multiparty democracies

  Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties · 2025-03-12

  articleSenior author

  Presidential democracies with multiparty systems are often characterized as challenging settings for voters to accurately place parties according to their ideological positions. In this study, we examine the role of coalitions as a heuristic tool in aiding this process. We argue that the central role of the president in coalition formation and operation, combined with the higher complexity of party systems, makes coalition information in these democracies more accessible and understandable primarily among sophisticated voters. Testing our hypotheses with data from three presidential multi-party democracies, we find that, as expected, sophisticated voters are more likely than less sophisticated voters to perceive parties in coalition with the president's party as ideologically closer to the party of the president. These findings challenge the common portrayal of voter perceptions of parties in these systems as lacking ideological clarity and coherence, and they enhance our understanding of how coalition governments influence these perceptions across different democratic contexts and levels of voter sophistication.

  PublisherDOI

• Tumultuous pies: Electoral dynamics in the Brexit era

  Electoral Studies · 2024-07-06

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Volatile pies: Modeling compositional volatility

  Social Science Quarterly · 2024-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Objective The study aims to demonstrate the utility of modeling compositional volatility in substantive domains beyond budgeting. Methods We show how to model compositional volatility on its own or as a part of a system of equations in which the component parts of the compositional outcome variable are also modeled. Results Using data on the volatility of support for German political parties, we demonstrate the usefulness of stand‐alone models of compositional volatility. Using data on the volatility of income shares in the United States, we demonstrate the usefulness of modeling volatility together with compositional components. Conclusion There is considerable potential for modeling compositional volatility.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Look over there. Where? A compositional approach to the modeling of public opinion on the most important problem

  Social Science Quarterly · 2024-04-02 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Objective This study aims to test whether the American public is polarized and/or parallel in its assessments of the most important problem. Methods We use compositional time series models and new data on public opinion to test for differences between subgroups. Results We find inconsistent evidence of polarization for some issue areas but not others and remarkably robust evidence of parallel reactions across subgroups to economic and international shocks. Conclusion The U.S. public is remarkably consistent in terms of its assessments of the most important problem and in how subgroups shift their perceptions of issue importance in reaction to changing circumstances.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A simple approach to dealing with partial contestation

  Social Science Quarterly · 2024-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Objective We propose a simple approach to dealing with partial contestation in models of multiparty elections. Methods Our proposed approach is to add a tiny value to the vote share of parties that do not contest a district and then to include dummy variables identifying those districts in which parties do not compete. We can then estimate a single system of equations using a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) approach and Aitchison's log‐ratio transformation. In our SUR system, we interact the dummy variable for a party that partially contested districts with other predictors in the equation that uses the share of votes of the same party in the log‐ratio outcome. Finally, we estimate robust standard errors for predictors in this equation to address heteroscedasticity. Results We demonstrate the utility of our approach using simulated data and election results from the English parliamentary elections in 2017. Conclusion From our simulations, we find that our recommended approach performs as well as that proposed by Tom, Tucker, and Wittenberg. Our strategy is advantageous in that it is easy to estimate, uses information from all districts, and addresses partial contestation in real‐world elections with a single system of seemingly unrelated regressions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bad times keep us together: Policy priorities and economic shocks

  Social Science Quarterly · 2024-04-12 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Objective We analyze how economic shocks affect the partisan nature of budgetary trade‐offs and use data from the U.S. Census Annual Survey of Government Finance to illustrate it. Methods We propose a compositional approach to model trade‐offs among 10 budgetary categories across both time and space in U.S. states. Results We find support for the notion that partisanship drives the allocation of budgetary expenditures. However, during times of negative economic shocks, either within a state or in neighboring states, Democratic and Republican governors have a similar budgetary response. Conclusions The results show the effects of economic and political shifts, as well as the implications of spillovers from other states, on partisan decisions about trade‐offs in government budgets.

  PublisherDOI

• Corrigendum to ‘Tumultuous pies: Electoral dynamics in the Brexit’ era’ [Electoral Studies 90c (2024) /102821]

  Electoral Studies · 2024-07-17

  erratumOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-16

  book-chapterSenior author

  Government budgets can be complex and contentious. Chapter 1 explains the importance of understanding government budgetary behavior and argues for taking a more realistic view of the process. If governments change part of the budget, then they may need to jostle other budgetary pieces as well. We introduce the broad brushstrokes of our theoretical argument that explains when governments have the desire and power to alter budgets, given both their ideological preferences and contextual factors. We acknowledge that spending increases or decreases in some policy areas may require shifts in budgets for other areas, so we use a compositional methodological approach to investigate those changes. In addition, we foreshadow how our theoretical argument also helps to explain the linkages between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility. To test theories about these linkages we use panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) models. In order to make our findings from the complex models that we use to test our theoretical propositions accessible, we will use a series of graphical interpretation strategies and present technical details of our models and graphs in appendices. Overall, Chapter 1 sets the stage for a book that unravels the brainteaser of government budgetary behavior across countries and years.

  PublisherDOI

• Four Sides of the Budgetary Ledger

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-16

  book-chapterSenior author

  We turn to the larger pieces of the budget in Chapter 5, where we focus on two objectives. First, we ask how the components of the budgets fit together by conducting causality tests for the full range of possible relationships between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility using a panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) model. We find that changes to expenditures and revenues drive changes to deficits, and we also find that changes to deficits lead to revenue changes. Second, using findings from these causality tests from the pVAR model, we then test our expectations about ideology and context on total spending, revenues, budget deficits, and budgetary volatility. Once we include these causal relationships in our models, we find that government ideology and majority status do not appear to alter either total expenditures or revenues, but a shift from a left to a right majority government is associated with a long-run decrease in deficits. For budgetary volatility, a move from a left to a right majority government corresponds with a positive significant increase in volatility. These findings fit our expectations that it is political competition that shifts budgets, with government ideology many times proctoring for those differences.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul M. Kellstedt

  100 shared

• Laron Williams

  University of Missouri

  60 shared

• Andrew Philips

  University of Colorado Boulder

  54 shared

• Cameron Wimpy

  Arkansas State University

  47 shared

• Christine S. Lipsmeyer

  Texas A&M University

  20 shared

• Flávio D. S. Souza

  Texas A&M University

  18 shared

• Steven A. Tuch

  George Washington University

  18 shared

• Ali Kagalwala

  Texas A&M University

  9 shared