The curse of dimensionality in Voting Advice Applications: reliability and validity in algorithm design

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) offers voters a simplified means by which to estimate their alignment with the candidates contesting a given election. But are the outputs generated by such applications both reliable and valid? While they differ greatly in design and degree of sophistication, most VAAs share a distinctive element that serves as their defining feature: an aggregation algorithm. Aggregation algorithms are the source of a VAA's legitimacy and yet no formal framework for their evaluation has as yet been agreed upon. We posit a dimensionality reduction technique as a corrective to recognised shortcomings in the dominant approaches to VAA design. We then test our model within a proposed framework for evaluating the validity and reliability of VAA algorithms.     

The Bush Administration and National Security Policy-making: A Preliminary Assessment

The Bush administration's approach to national security policy–making, at least as judged by the early record, can be characterized accordingly: managerial, collegial, incremental and pragmatic. Each of these elements will be considered in turn as part of a preliminary assessment of whether the Bush administration's approach to American national security is adequate to deal with the challenges that the United States will face in world affairs during the "post–Cold War era" of the 1990s.     

我国非营利组织市场导向及其影响因素研究——以全国采供血机构为例

国外在非营利组织市场导向研究方面已经有十余年经验,而我国在这一领域的研究才刚刚起步.以我国采供血机构(包括血站、血液中心等)为研究对象,通过问卷调查方法对MARKOR量表是否适用于我国非营利组织、我国采供血机构市场导向的现状、管理者对采供血机构市场导向的影响等问题进行了探讨.研究发现,MARKOR量表在测量采供血机构市场导向方面总体上有较高的信度和效度,但是在"组织对信息反应"构面上,个别指标的信度和效度比较低;在采供血机构市场导向的三个构面中,"跨部门信息传播"的得分最高,而"市场信息收集"的得分最低,这与发达国家的研究结论存在较大差异;管理者的职业教育、职业精神与市场导向的状况之间存在正相关关系.并且,进一步发现,职业精神对市场导向与职业教育的关系存在中介效应.最后,对以上发现的现实意义进行了讨论并指出了未来研究的方向.     

Instruments for Exploring Organizational Culture: A Review of the Literature

Organizational culture is widely considered to be one of the most significant factors in reforming and modernizing public administration and service delivery. This article documents the findings of a literature review of existing qualitative and quantitative instruments for the exploration of organizational culture. Seventy instruments are identified, of which 48 could be submitted to psychometric assessment. The majority of these are at a preliminary stage of development. The study's conclusion is that there is no ideal instrument for cultural exploration. The degree to which any measure is seen as "fit for purpose" depends on the particular reason for which it is to be used and the context within which it is to be applied.     

The labor migration sending regions in the state of Zacatecas

"In a preliminary survey in the state of Zacatecas, [Mexico,] we identified those municipalities which contribute most to the migration of Mexican workers to the United States; later, we corroborated our findings in situ and drew up an approximation of the geographic and economic characteristics of those municipalities, which make up 'migration sending zones or regions' in the state." (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

Why Democracies May Actually Be Less Reliable Allies

Recent research builds on the observation that democracies have more durable alliances to argue that democracies make more reliable allies. This need not be the case. Alliances serve as commitment devices, adding ex ante credibility to states' claims about ex post behavior. Variation in alliance durability must reflect differences in the desirability of formalizing alignments. Put simply, democracies are "most improved" by formal commitments. We offer two related explanations for why democracies might actually be less reliable alliance partners. Information costs for participating in policymaking and the advantages of organized interest groups combined with distributional incentives generated by the periodic turnover of governments may conspire to make informal commitments on the part of democracies problematic. Determining the net effect of democratic virtue and vice is best done empirically. We test alliance reliability by focusing on intervention, rather than on the duration or the number of commitments. Our results suggest that democracies make less reliable allies.     

低自我控制与家庭社会经济地位在青少年犯罪中的作用——我国青少年犯罪成因实证研究初探

本研究分别对以官方统计数据和自我报告法获得的数据进行初步回归分析发现,在影响青少年犯罪的多种因素中,"低自我控制(low self-control)"的解释力最为突出,证实了青春期特有的身心冲突极有可能是导致此人生阶段犯罪(或偏差行为)激增的主要因素。同时我们还发现了家庭社会经济地位在青少年犯罪中的特殊作用。     

Rules that Many Use: Standards and Global Regulation

Global regulation increasingly relies on alternatives to legal rules, variously termed "soft law,""best-practice rules," or "standards." Such voluntary best-practice rules can be highly effective. Standards influence users by virtue of the expertise on which they are based and because of their enforcement by public and private actors. Standards globally proliferate because they are more compatible with regulatory autonomy of states than binding directives. When global standards are effective, the question of how to subject them to democratic control often arises. The prospects for holding global standard setters accountable largely depend on how decisions on standards are made. These insights are illustrated by examples of the global regulation of financial markets. The preliminary evidence suggests that standards need to be taken more seriously by students of global regulation.     

The pits and the core: Simple collective decision problems with concave preferences

This essay extends the theory of simple collective decision problems to spatial games in which (contrary to the traditional assumption) each agent's preferences are concave, in the sense that the alternatives that the agent does not prefer to any particular reference alternative together constitute a convex set. Such concave preferences might characterize decision problems in which, say, a site must be selected for some obnoxious facility, such as a prison, garbage dump, or facility for managing hazardous materials. The results indicate that, under these conditions, the (weak -)core can be structurally unstable, changing discontinuously with apparently minor perturbations of the decision problem. The main theorem identifies a curious property of the core when the set of feasible alternatives is compact and convex and each agent's preferences are strictly concave. Namely, a point in the feasible set's interior can belong to the core only if there is no feasible alternative that makes every member of any winning coalition strictly worse off. In this sense, an interior point belongs to the core only if it lies in the pits.A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the West Coast Conference on Small Groups Research, Stanford University, 17 April 1985, and the Experimental Social Choice Workshop, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, 20–21 June 1985. This material is based on work supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (Grants SES 83-12123 and SES 84-10094), the Real Estate Center and Department of Decision Sciences of The Wharton School, and the Research Fund of the University of Pennsylvania.     

The stability of stated preferences for public goods: Evidence from recent budget games

We have investigated the stability of the individual response in recent budget games based on survey data, which is an important requirement for the reliability of this instrument. Budget games have gained popularity due to the problems encountered with alternative methods to determine preferences for public goods, such as the analysis of actual public expenditure date using median-voter theory or similar approaches. The short-term test-retest correlations (within an interval of one month) turn out to be rather low, typical around 0.3. No explanation of the test-retest differences could be found from the usual socio-economic and political characteristics of the respondents or from information characteristics of the survey design. Also, the pattern of budget-game outcomes for different countries and different periods is rather similar. The cumulative evidence suggests that the survey response to budget games is generated to a large extent by very general notions on the (un)desirability of public goods: defence is bad, education and health care are good. This implies that outcomes are often not related to the actual level and structure of public expenditure or revenues. As a result, the individual responses, even to the more sophisticated budget games, are subject to large uncertainty margins. Our results should warn researchers and, even more important, policy makers against giving too much weight to stated preferences for public expenditure or taxation levels obtained from budget games. Of course, further research is needed to obtain the precise limits of the instrument, including laboratory experimental economics.     

Mortality in Mexico. Some considerations on rural-urban differentials

"In this essay, certain aspects related to rural-urban mortality differentials in Mexico are analyzed....[These include] the availability, advantages, and limitations of different sources of information and the disparity of levels and tendencies according to particular indicators of acceptable reliability, especially those deriving from recent demographic surveys conducted in Mexico. The findings confirm an inverse ratio between size of settlement and mortality, and reveal a widening of the differentials over time." (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

The 1994 EU Referendum in Norway: Continuity and Change

In the 1994 EU referendum a majority of Norwegian voters rejected membership in the European Union. The outcome contrasts with victories for membership in the corresponding referendums in Austria, Finland and Sweden. The article reports a preliminary investigation of factors relating to the support for "no". Analysis of aggregate data (representing 435 municipalities) and survey data demonstrates the importance of traditional cleavages as well as new cleavages for the vote. The no-vote was strongest in northern Norway, among supporters of the traditional "counter-cultures" and among those employed in the primary sector. Women were more likely to vote no as were public sector employees. The major parties took relatively clear stands on the issue, and we find that party identification shows a strong correlation with the vote in the referendum. With a turnout of 89 percent, the 1994 referendum represents an all-time high for elections in Norway. Compared with the previous referendum on the EC in 1972, we find that the increase in mobilization was particularly strong in the no-dominated periphery, but the shift in mobilization patterns was not decisive for the outcome of the referendum.     

Is it ‘Fake News’? Intelligence Community expertise and news dissemination as measurements for media reliability

Self-communication platforms have generated a myriad of outlets and news producers that represent a challenge for modern societies. Therefore, it is relevant to explore new measurements that can help understand whether a specific outlet disseminating news could be considered reliable or not. This study is based on the expertise from the U.S. Intelligence Community to offer a statistical model that replicates the reliability measurements based on intelligence expertise. The results suggest that a classification algorithm could be useful to measure news media reliability. Additionally, different variables were identified to predict perceptions of media reliability.     

Party identification and party closeness in comparative perspective

The present analysis uses data from 1974 and 1981 U. S. cross sections, which incorporate a panel, to compare the standard NES measure of party identification (ID) with a measure of partisanship derived from a party closeness question widely employed in cross-national research. Important features of the two scales are examined by transforming the closeness measure into a scale of very close, fairly close, not very close, and no preference corresponding to the seven-point ID scale. The scales are highly correlated and are similar in their reliability. More than 75% of the independents in the ID scale choose a party in the closeness version, and over half of these select the fairly close category. Respondents do not volunteer that they are independents when that alternative is not stated in the question.     

政府信息公开行为的可诉性及相关制度思考

主动公开信息的行为具有有限的可诉性,应从程序上保障第三方救济的权利。被告在诉讼中负有举证责任,但涉及国家秘密信息的举证应允许被告补充证据;对于信息不存在的证明,原告应该提供信息存在的初步线索。政府信息公开诉讼可以借鉴美国的"秘密审查模式",进行不公开单方审理。对于不予公开信息的司法认定,应基于法益判断进行利益衡量,以使申请人权利与第三方隐私权、商业秘密、国家保密权等权利达到相对的平衡。     

The spatial character of Russia's new democracy

To date, virtually all research on Russian elections, beginning in 1991, have used tools and methodological approaches akin to voting research from the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers have relied either on public opinion polls that try to tease out correlations between a standard menu of socio-economic characteristics, attitudes about candidates, and self-reports of voting history; or on journalistic assessments of aggregate election returns, coupled with substantive expertise of Russian politics. Here, then, we try to gain an understanding of those elections in more contemporary theoretical terms – in terms of the spatial analysis of elections and voting. Although our analysis relies on a less-than-optimal source of data – election returns aggregated up to the level of individual rayons (countries) – we are able to draw a spatial map of those elections that is not too dissimilar from what others infer using less explicit methodologies. Specifically, we find that throughout the 1991–1996 period, a single issue – reform – has and continues to dominate the electorate's responses to candidates and parties. On the other hand, we find little evidence of the emergence of nationalism as an issue, but conclude that to the extent we can detect this issue in the 1996 presidential contest, one candidate, General Alexander Lebed, did succeed in differentiating himself from other nationalist candidates (most notably, Vladimir Zhirinovski) without abandoning the reformist camp. In general, then, this preliminary analysis suggests that the same tools used elsewhere to uncover the spatial map of elections and the connection between basic and actionable issues (individual level thermometer score rankings of candidates and parties) can be applied to Russia with the promise of coherent, understandable results.     

Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions

Using the SRC/CPS's national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investigates the effect of education on consistency among the public's domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use liberal and conservative terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1978 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

The design of rent-seeking competitions: Committees,preliminary and final contests

The paper examines the common practice in multi-contest rent- seeking competitions, where “finalists” are selected, based on rent-seekers' efforts in a preliminary contest. We find that for any single-contest design, rent-seeking expenditures could be reduced by introducing a preliminary contest, if the marginal returns to rent- seeking effort in the preliminary contest is sufficiently low. In addition to other reasons, the paper argues that this may explain why such multi-contest designs are common. We argue that rent-seeking expenditure in the preliminary stage represents the cost of reducing the number of contestants. We also find that the practice of setting a higher “quality” standard in the final contest than the “quality” standard in the preliminary contest reduces rent-seeking waste. We derive an expression for the optimal number of finalists; under certain conditions we find that the optimal number of finalists is directly proportional or equal to the square root of the number of potential contestants. Finally, we show that whether rent-seeking expenditures rise or fall when the rent is awarded by a committee instead of a single administrator depends on the sensitivity of the committee relative to that of the single administrator.     

Rural Development Councils: An Intergovernmental Coordination Experiment

Eight pilot state Rural Development Councils were establishedby the federal government in 1990 to coordinate rural developmentefforts among federal departments and agencies and to establishcollaborative relationships with states, local governments,and the private sector. After one year of operation, these councilsprovided a mechanism for the participating states to definethe rural issues relevant to their unique settings and to worktoward the accomplishment of their goals. In addition, the processallowed federal officials in Washington and in the states toutilize the discretion available in the system to maximize collaborationand cooperation. Additional states will be involved in the effortin 1992. Three types of agendas or expectations surrounded theinitiative: substantive, political, and process approaches.Although it is too early to determine the extent to which thecouncils have "delivered" on these expectations, the experimentprovides preliminary evidence of the scope of federal abilityto stimulate change within a state as well as the economic andpolitical forces that constrain it.     

The missing piece: Measuring portfolio salience in Western European parliamentary democracies

Abstract.  Although much has been discovered concerning the resources and preferences that parties take into the coalition formation game in Western European parliamentary democracies, we know a good deal less about the payoffs they receive. Portfolios constitute an important payoff, not just because they provide access to patronage, but because influence over policy decisions tends to go with control over the key government portfolios. It is easy to discover which and how many portfolios each party holds in any government, but what is missing is accurate measurement of the value or salience of these portfolios. Some attempts have been made to measure portfolio salience, but they have lacked one or more of the following properties: cross-national scope, country-specific measurement, coverage of the full set of postwar portfolios, measurement by multiple experts and measurement at the interval level. In this article, we present a new data contribution: a set of portfolio salience scores that possesses all of these properties for 14 Western European countries derived from an expert survey. We demonstrate the comprehensiveness and reliability of the ratings, and undertake some preliminary analyses that show what the ratings reveal about parliamentary government in Western Europe.