Simulating Models of Issue Voting

Ola Listhaug Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway e-mail: olal{at}svt.ntnu.no e-mail: rabinowitz{at}unc.edu (corresponding author) How should one analyze data when the underlying models beingtested are statistically intractable? In this article, we offera simulation approach that involves creating sets of artificialdata with fully known generating models that can be meaningfullycompared to real data. The strategy depends on constructingsimulations that are well matched to the data against whichthey will be compared. Our particular concern is to considerconcurrently how voters place parties on issue scales and howthey evaluate parties based on issues. We reconsider the Lewisand King (2000) analysis of issue voting in Norway. The simulationfindings resolve the ambiguity that Lewis and King report, asvoters appear to assimilate and contrast party placements andto evaluate parties directionally. The simulations also providea strong caveat against the use of individually perceived partyplacements in analyses of issue voting.     

Bayesian Multilevel Estimation with Poststratification: State-Level Estimates from National Polls

Andrew Gelman Departments of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 e-mail: gelman{at}stat.columbia.edu Joseph Bafumi Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 We fit a multilevel logistic regression model for the mean ofa binary response variable conditional on poststratificationcells. This approach combines the modeling approach often usedin small-area estimation with the population information usedin poststratification (see Gelman and Little 1997, Survey Methodology23:127–135). To validate the method, we apply it to U.S.preelection polls for 1988 and 1992, poststratified by state,region, and the usual demographic variables. We evaluate themodel by comparing it to state-level election outcomes. Themultilevel model outperforms more commonly used models in politicalscience. We envision the most important usage of this methodto be not forecasting elections but estimating public opinionon a variety of issues at the state level.     

A Simple Multivariate Test for Asymmetric Hypotheses

Michael J. Gilligan Department of Politics, New York University, 7th Floor, 726 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 Matt Golder Department of Political Science, Florida State University, 531 Bellamy Building, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230 e-mail: wrclark{at}umich.edu (corresponding author) e-mail: michael.gilligan{at}nyu.edu e-mail: mgolder{at}fsu.edu In this paper, we argue that claims of necessity and sufficiencyinvolve a type of asymmetric causal claim that is useful inmany social scientific contexts. Contrary to some qualitativeresearchers, we maintain that there is nothing about such asymmetriesthat should lead scholars to depart from standard social sciencepractice. We take as given that deterministic and monocausaltests are inappropriate in the social world and demonstratethat standard multiplicative interaction models are up to thetask of handling asymmetric causal claims in a multivariate,probabilistic manner. We illustrate our argument with examplesfrom the empirical literature linking electoral institutionsand party system size.     

Issue Attitudes and Survey Continuity across Interview Mode in the 2000 NES

Nathan J. Kelly Department of Political Science, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260-4120 e-mail: nkelly{at}buffalo.edu H. Whitt Kilburn Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265 e-mail: wkilburn{at}email.unc.edu Can researchers draw consistent inferences about the U.S. public'sissue attitudes when studying survey results from both the in-personand telephone interview modes of the 2000 National ElectionStudies (NES) survey? We address this question through an analysiscontrasting the distribution of issue attitudes across modesin the dual sample design of the 2000 NES. We find clear differencesacross mode even when applying a method devised by the NES toimprove comparability by recoding issue attitude scales fromthe in-person mode. We present an alternative method of recodingthese scales, which substantially improves comparability betweenmodes. Through an analysis of the covariance structure of theissues and simple models of vote choice, we discuss the implicationsof the results for the study of issue attitudes in the 2000NES.     

Does Mode Matter For Modeling Political Choice? Evidence From the 2005 British Election Study

Harold D. Clarke and Marianne C. Stewart School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083 e-mail: hclarke{at}utdallas.edu e-mail: mstewart{at}utdallas.edu Paul Whiteley Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, England CO4 3SQ e-mail: whiteley{at}essex.ac.uk e-mail: sanders{at}essex.ac.uk (Corresponding author) Although political scientists have begun to investigate theproperties of Internet surveys, much remains to be learned aboutthe utility of the Internet mode for conducting major surveyresearch projects such as national election studies. This paperaddresses this topic by presenting the results of an extensivesurvey comparison experiment conducted as part of the 2005 BritishElection Study. Analyses show statistically significant, butgenerally small, differences in distributions of key explanatoryvariables in models of turnout and party choice. Estimatingmodel parameters reveals that there are few statistically significantdifferences between coefficients generated using the in-personand Internet data, and the relative explanatory power of rivalmodels is virtually identical for the two types of data. Ingeneral, the in-person and Internet data tell very similar storiesabout what matters for turnout and party preference in Britain.Determining if similar findings obtain in other countries shouldhave high priority on the research agenda for national electionstudies. Authors' note: We thank the U.K. Economics and Social ResearchCouncil (ESRC) and Gary Williams, Senior Science Manager atthe ESRC, for their generous support of, and interest in, thisproject. We also thank the editor and anonymous reviewers forhelpful comments and suggestions.     

Parties in Elections, Parties in Government, and Partisan Bias

Adam Meirowitz Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: ameirowi{at}princeton.edu Thomas Romer Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: romer{at}princeton.edu Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidatesin elections and when winning candidates choose among policyalternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions,incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choicesare substantively complex and analytically unwieldy, particularlyif modeled explicitly and considered in total, from citizenpreferences through government outcomes. To strike a balancebetween complexity and tractability, we modify standard spatialmodels of electoral competition and governmental policy-makingto study how components of partisanship—such as candidateplatform separation in elections, party ID-based voting, nationalpartisan tides, and party-disciplined behavior in the legislature—arerelated to policy outcomes. We define partisan bias as the distancebetween the following two points in a conventional choice space:the ideal point of the median voter in the median legislativedistrict and the policy outcome selected by the elected legislature.The study reveals that none of the party-in-electorate conditionsis capable of producing partisan bias independently. Specifiedcombinations of conditions, however, can significantly increasethe bias and/or the variance of policy outcomes, sometimes insubtle ways.     

Splitting the Difference? Causal Inference and Theories of Split-party Delegations

Matthew J. Butler Department of Economics, 549 Evans Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 e-mail: butler{at}econ.berkeley.edu e-mail: daniel_butler{at}stanford.edu (corresponding author) We provide an introduction to the regression discontinuity design(RDD) and use the technique to evaluate models of sequentialSenate elections predicting that the winning party for one Senateseat will receive fewer votes in the next election for the otherseat. Using data on U.S. Senate elections from 1946 to 2004,we find strong evidence that the outcomes of the elections forthe two Senate seats are independent.     

Practical Issues in Implementing and Understanding Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation

Andrew Gelman Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY e-mail: gelman{at}stat.columbia.edu, www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/ David K. Park Department of Political Science, Washington University, St. Louis, MO e-mail: dpark{at}artsci.wustl.edu Noah Kaplan Department of Political Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX e-mail: nkaplan{at}uh.edu Logistic regression models have been used in political sciencefor estimating ideal points of legislators and Supreme Courtjustices. These models present estimation and identifiabilitychallenges, such as improper variance estimates, scale and translationinvariance, reflection invariance, and issues with outliers.We address these issues using Bayesian hierarchical modeling,linear transformations, informative regression predictors, andexplicit modeling for outliers. In addition, we explore newways to usefully display inferences and check model fit.     

The Uncovered Set and the Limits of Legislative Action

Ivan Jeliazkov Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine,Irvine, CA Itai Sened Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO We present a simulation technique for sorting out the size,shape, and location of the uncovered set to estimate the setof enactable outcomes in "real-world" social choice situations,such as the contemporary Congress. The uncovered set is a well-knownbut underexploited solution concept in the literature on spatialvoting games and collective choice mechanisms. We explain thissolution concept in nontechnical terms, submit some theoreticalobservations to improve our theoretical grasp of it, and providea simulation technique that makes it possible to estimate thisset and thus enable a series of tests of its empirical relevance.     

Accounting for Voter Heterogeneity within and across Districts with a Factor-Analytic Voter-Choice Model

José Afonso Mazzon Faculdade de Administração e Economia, University of São Paulo, Ave. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, 908, CEP 0558-900 São Paulo, Brazil. e-mail: jamazzon{at}usp.br e-mail: kamakura{at}duke.edu (corresponding author) In this study, we propose a model of individual voter behaviorthat can be applied to aggregate data at the district (or precinct)levels while accounting for differences in political preferencesacross districts and across voters within each district. Ourmodel produces a mapping of the competing candidates and electoraldistricts on a latent "issues" space that describes how politicalpreferences in each district deviate from the average voterand how each candidate caters to average voter preferences withineach district. We formulate our model as a random-coefficientsnested logit model in which the voter first evaluates the candidatesto decide whether or not to cast his or her vote, and then choosesthe candidate who provides him or her with the highest value.Because we allow the random coefficient to vary not only acrossdistricts but also across unobservable voters within each district,the model avoids the Independence of Irrelevant AlternativesAssumption both across districts and within each district, therebyaccounting for the cannibalization of votes among similar candidateswithin and across voting districts. We illustrate our proposedmodel by calibrating it to the actual voting data from the firststage of a two-stage state governor election in the Brazilianstate of Santa Catarina, and then using the estimates to predictthe final outcome of the second stage.     

Context and the Economic Vote: A Multilevel Analysis

Randy Stevenson Department of Political Science, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, Texas 77251–1892 e-mail: rduch{at}uh.edu (corresponding author) e-mail: stevenso{at}ruf.rice.edu Voters use observed economic performance to infer the competenceof incumbent politicians. These economic perceptions enter thevoter's utility calculations modified by a weight that is minimizedwhen the variance in exogenous shocks to the economy is verylarge relative to the variance in economic outcomes associatedwith the competence of politicians. Cross-national variationsin the political and economic context systematically increaseor undermine the voter's ability to ascertain the competencyof incumbents. We test one hypothesis: As policy-making responsibilityis shared more equally among parties, economic evaluations willbe more important in the vote decision. We employ two multilevelmodeling procedures for estimating the contextual variationsin micro-level economic voting effects: a conventional pooledapproach and a two-stage procedure. We compare the multivariateresults of a pooled method with our two-stage estimation procedureand conclude that they are similar. Our empirical efforts usedata from 163 national surveys from 18 countries over a 22-yearperiod.     

Applying a Two-Step Strategy to the Analysis of Cross-National Public Opinion Data

W. Phillips Shively Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences Bldg. 267 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 email: kjlong{at}umich.edu (corresponding author) email: shively{at}polisci.umn.edu. In recent years, large sets of national surveys with sharedcontent have increasingly been used for cross-national opinionresearch. But scholars have not yet settled on the most flexibleand efficient models for utilizing such data. We present a two-stepstrategy for such analysis that takes advantage of the factthat in such datasets each "cluster" (i.e., country sample)is large enough to sustain separate analysis of its internalvariances and covariances. We illustrate the method by examininga puzzle of comparative electoral behavior—why does turnoutdecline rather than increase with the number of parties competingin an election (Blais and Dobryzynska 1998, for example)? Thisdiscussion demonstrates the ease with which a two-step strategyincorporates confounding variables operating at different levelsof analysis. Technical appendices demonstrate that the two-stepstrategy does not lose efficiency of estimation as comparedwith a pooling strategy.     

The Introduction of Voter Registration and Its Effect on Turnout

David M. Konisky Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room E53-386, Cambridge, MA 02139 e-mail: sda{at}mit.edu e-mail: konisky{at}mit.edu (corresponding author) Studies of voter turnout across states find that those withmore facilitative registration laws have higher turnout rates.Eliminating registration barriers altogether is estimated toraise voter participation rates by up to 10%. This article presentspanel estimates of the effects of introducing registration thatexploits changes in registration laws and turnout within states.New York and Ohio imposed registration requirements on all oftheir counties in 1965 and 1977, respectively. We find thatthe introduction of registration to counties that did not previouslyrequire registration decreased participation over the long termby three to five percentage points. Though significant, thisis lower than estimates of the effects of registration fromcross-sectional studies and suggests that expectations aboutthe effects of registration reforms on turnout may be overstated.     

How Diffusion of Power in Parliaments Affects Voter Choice

e-mail: oritk{at}umich.edu I analyze how the diffusion of power in parliaments affectsvoter choice. Using a two-step research design, I first estimatean individual-level model of voter choice in 14 parliamentarydemocracies, allowing voters to hold preferences both for theparty most similar to them ideologically and for the party thatpulls policy in their direction. While in systems in which poweris concentrated the two motivations converge, in consensualsystems they diverge: since votes will likely be watered downby bargaining in the parliament, outcome-oriented choice inconsensual systems often leads voters to endorse parties whosepositions differ from their own views. In the second step, Iutilize institutional measures of power diffusion in the parliamentto account for the degree to which voters in different politiespursue one motivation versus the other. I demonstrate that themore power diffusion and compromise built into the politicalsystem via institutional mechanisms, the more voters compensatefor the watering down of their vote by endorsing parties whosepositions differ from their own views.     

Forecasting the Vote: A Theoretical Comparison of Election Markets and Public Opinion Polls

Michael E. Sobel 421 Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 e-mail: mes105{at}columbia.edu The dominant methodology for short-term forecasting of electoraloutcomes uses trial-heat polls, where respondents report theircurrent electoral preferences (not their election-day predictions).Election markets, where self-selected participants trade sharesof candidates at prices predictive of election-day results,provide an alternative method that often produces more accurateforecasts. Consequently, increasing attention is being paidto this methodology. However, it is poorly understood and lackstheoretical justification. Surprisingly, the rationale for forecastingusing trial-heat polls has not been completely developed either.We develop the justification for using both election marketsand public opinion polls to forecast electoral outcomes, givingconditions under which each method performs ideally. For theideal case, we prove (under the reasonable assumption that marketparticipants are aware of the poll results) that the mean squareprediction error for the market forecast is smaller than thatof any forecast based on one or more polls. The case in whichthe assumptions supporting each method fail is also considered.It is often reasonable to expect that the best case resultshold approximately, in which case the market forecast shouldalso beat any poll-based forecast. We also compare the biasand variance of market and poll-based forecasts; our resultssuggest the utility of using the series of market prices tostudy the course of campaigns.     

Does Voting by Mail Increase Participation? Using Matching to Analyze a Natural Experiment

Megan Mullin Department of Political Science, Temple University, 408 Gladfelter Hall (025-22), 1115 West Berks Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122-6089 e-mail: mmullin{at}temple.edu (corresponding author) Would holding elections by mail increase voter turnout? Manyelectoral reform advocates predict that mail ballot electionswill boost participation, basing their prediction on the highturnout rate among absentee voters and on the rise in voterturnout after Oregon switched to voting by mail. However, selectionproblems inherent to studies of absentee voters and Oregon giveus important reasons to doubt whether their results would extendto more general applications of voting by mail. In this paper,we isolate the effects of voting in mail ballot elections bytaking advantage of a natural experiment in which voters areassigned in a nearly random process to cast their ballots bymail. We use matching methods to ensure that, in our analysis,the demographic characteristics of these voters mirror thoseof polling-place voters who take part in the same elections.Drawing on data from a large sample of California counties intwo general elections, we find that voting by mail does notdeliver on the promise of greater participation in general elections.In fact, voters who are assigned to vote by mail turn out atlower rates than those who are sent to a polling place. Analysisof a sample of local special elections, by contrast, indicatesthat voting by mail can increase turnout in these otherwiselow-participation contests. Authors' note: We are grateful to the Haynes Foundation forsupporting this project, Karin MacDonald for bringing mail ballotprecincts to our attention, Anup Pradhan for providing criticaldata, Shawn Treier for his helpful comments on an earlier draft,and Sam Deddeh and Mike Binder for data entry assistance.     

The Company You Keep: How Voters Infer Party Positions on European Integration from Governing Coalition Arrangements

Recent studies document that voters infer parties’ left‐right positions from governing coalition arrangements. We show that citizens extend this coalition‐based heuristic to the European integration dimension and, furthermore, that citizens’ coalition‐based inferences on this issue conflict with alternative measures of party positions derived from election manifestos and expert placements. We also show that citizens’ perceptions of party positions on Europe matter, in that they drive substantial partisan sorting in the electorate. Our findings have implications for parties’ election strategies and for mass‐elite policy linkages.     

Analyzing the 2000 National Election Study

Nancy Burns Center for Political Studies 4246 ISR, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1248 e-mail: nburns{at}umich.edu (corresponding author) Michael J. Ensley Department of Political Science, 210 Woodburn Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 e-mail: ensley{at}indiana.edu Donald R. Kinder Center for Political Studies 4258 ISR, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1248 e-mail: drkinder{at}umich.edu In an earlier report, two of us (Bowers and Ensley, 2003, NationalElection Studies Technical Report, www.umich.edu/nes) provideda general framework for understanding the particular strategyoutlined by Fogarty et al. (in this issue). Fogarty et al.'sstrategy is to make the face-to-face variables more like therandom digit dial (RDD) telephone variables by trimming theends in order to reduce the variance of the face-to-face (FTF)variables. Perhaps some scholars will want the FTF variablesto look like the RDD variables, but that would be a fix fora specific research question. Given the significant differencesin the representativeness of the samples, the processes of surveynonresponse, and the quality and character of the responsesbetween data taken from a National Area Probability sample inperson and data taken from an RDD telephone sample, researchquestions involving comparisons with other years in the 50-yeartime series will require different remedies.     

Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court

Timothy R. Johnson Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 e-mail: trj{at}umn.edu James F. Spriggs, II Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St Louis, MO 63130 e-mail: jspriggs{at}artsci.wustl.edu Sangick Jeon Department of Political Science, Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Encina Hall West, Room 100, Stanford, CA 94305-6044 e-mail: sjeon{at}stanford.edu Paul J. Wahlbeck Department of Political Science, George Washington University, 1922 F Street, N.W. Suite 401, Washington, DC 20052 e-mail: wahlbeck{at}gwu.edu e-mail: jhfowler{at}ucsd.edu (corresponding author) We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinionswritten by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite themfrom 1791 to 2005. We describe a method for using the patternsin citations within and across cases to create importance scoresthat identify the most legally relevant precedents in the networkof Supreme Court law at any given point in time. Our measuresare superior to existing network-based alternatives and, forexample, offer information regarding case importance not evidentin simple citation counts. We also demonstrate the validityof our measures by showing that they are strongly correlatedwith the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S.Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing,we show that network analysis is a viable way of measuring howcentral a case is to law at the Court and suggest that it canbe used to measure other legal concepts. Authors' note: We appreciate the suggestions of Randy Calvert,Frank Cross, Pauline Kim, Andrew Martin, Richard Pacelle, JimRogers, Margo Schlanger, Amy Steigerwalt, and participants inthe Workshop on Empirical Research in the Law at WashingtonUniversity in St Louis School of Law. We presented former versionsof this article at the 2006 meeting of the Midwest PoliticalScience Association, Chicago, April 20–23; the 2006 meetingof the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA,January 5–7; and the 2006 Empirical Legal Studies Conference,Austin, TX, October 27–28.     

Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal

Michael H. Crespin Department of Political Science, Michigan State University, 303 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824 e-mail: e-mail: crespinm{at}msu.edu Jeffery A. Jenkins Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208 e-mail: e-mail: j-jenkins3{at}northwestern.edu Ryan J. Vander Wielen Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1027, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 e-mail: e-mail: rjvander{at}artsci.wustl.edu This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article"Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the ContemporaryCongress," published in the American Journal of Political Science(44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and MitchellSanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary toall previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirkingin the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustnessof their results by reestimating their model with Congress-specificfixed effects and find that their results no longer hold.