Lab 7: Communicating results from Bayesian analysis

Applied Bayesian Modeling (ICPSR Summer Program 2025)
Author
Affiliation

Ursinus College

Published

July 20, 2025

This document mainly serves as an opportunity to show different ways of presenting and communicating Bayesian model results. Below, I reprint some examples of mostly visualizations, some of which you may have seen before in lecture. Many authors use similar types of figures to communicate results. The examples here are merely examples meant to provide some inspiration for your own work! There are several R packages with functions to create tables and figures similar to the ones below. In Scogin et al. (2019), we discuss some of them.

For background on the respective empirical models and context, please access the articles listed in this tutorial; you can find full citations at the end, and the articles are made available to you as part of this course.

Regression coefficient tables

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The table above is from Lee and Murdie (2021).


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The table above is from Blais, Guntermann, and Bodet (2017).


See citation below

The table above is from Beazer and Woo (2016).


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The table above is from Helgason and Mérola (2017).


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The table above is from Cao and Ward (2017).

Regression coefficient plots

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The figure above is from Cao and Ward (2017).


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The figure above shows the posterior distribution of linear regression coefficients; from Lee and Murdie (2021).


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The figure above is from Karreth (2018).

Postestimation quantities

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The figure above shows the posterior distribution of predicted changes; from Helgason and Mérola (2017).


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The figure above shows the posterior distribution of first differences after a logistic regression model; from Karreth (2018).


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The figure above shows the posterior distribution of linear regression coefficients; from Karreth, Tir, and Gibler (2022).


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The figure above shows the credible intervals of first differences after a series of logistic regression models; from my working paper, “Regional Trade Agreements and Concessions in GATT/WTO Trade Disputes”.


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The figure above shows the posterior distribution of latent democracy scores based on an IRT model; from Treier and Jackman (2008).

References

Beazer, Quintin H., and Byungwon Woo. 2016. “IMF Conditionality, Government Partisanship, and the Progress of Economic Reforms.” American Journal of Political Science 60 (2): 304–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12200.
Blais, André, Eric Guntermann, and Marc A. Bodet. 2017. “Linking Party Preferences and the Composition of Government: A New Standard for Evaluating the Performance of Electoral Democracy.” Political Science Research and Methods 5 (2): 315–31. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.78.
Cao, Xun, and Hugh Ward. 2017. “Transnational Climate Governance Networks and Domestic Regulatory Action.” International Interactions 43 (1): 76–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2016.1220162.
Helgason, Agnar Freyr, and Vittorio Mérola. 2017. “Employment Insecurity, Incumbent Partisanship, and Voting Behavior in Comparative Perspective.” Comparative Political Studies 50 (11): 1489–1523. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414016679176.
Karreth, Johannes. 2018. “The Economic Leverage of International Organizations in Interstate Disputes.” International Interactions 44 (3): 463–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2018.1389728.
Karreth, Johannes, Jaroslav Tir, and Douglas M. Gibler. 2022. “Latent Territorial Threat and Democratic Regime Reversals.” Journal of Peace Research 59 (2): 197–212. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211009770.
Lee, Myunghee, and Amanda Murdie. 2021. “The Global Diffusion of the #MeToo Movement.” Politics & Gender 17 (4): 827–55. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X20000148.
Scogin, Shana, Johannes Karreth, Andreas Beger, and Rob Williams. 2019. “BayesPostEst: An r Package to Generate Postestimation Quantities for Bayesian MCMC Estimation.” Journal of Open Source Software 4 (42): 1722. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01722.
Treier, Shawn, and Simon Jackman. 2008. Democracy as a Latent Variable.” American Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 201–17. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00308.x.