1

Paper

Coordination, Moderation and Institutional Balancing in American House Elections at Midterm Mebane, Walter R. Wand, Jonathan Uploaded 09-02-1999 Keywords campaign finance itemized contributions congressional elections generalized linear mixed model Monte Carlo EM random effects conditional compound Poisson process Abstract We use Federal Election Commission itemized contributions data from 1984 to estimate a model of campaign contributions in U.S. House elections. The model is a dynamic system of conditional compound Poisson processes in which there are contributions from both individuals and political action committees (PACs). The model includes random effects to allow for unobserved heterogeneity among districts and candidates. The dynamic effects measure how contributions to one candidate react to contributions to other candidates, as well as how contributions from individuals interact with contributions from PACs. We test the hypothesis that some candidates received higher contributions because of PAC endorsements. We also test whether national expectations about presidential election outcomes affect contributions to House candidates, as predicted by a policy moderating model. We use a Monte Carlo EM algorithm to optimize the likelihood of the model in specifications that include more than one random effect.

2

Paper

A Spatial Model of Electoral Platforms Elff, Martin Uploaded 07-01-2008 Keywords Parties party families electoral platforms party manifestos spatial models unobserved data latent trait models EM algorithm Monte Carlo integration Monte Carlo EM importance sampling SIR algorithm ideological dimensions Abstract The reconstruction of political positions of parties, candidates and governments has made considerable headway during the last decades, not the least due to the efforts of the Manifesto Research Group the and Comparative Manifestos Project, which compiled and published a data set on the electoral platforms of political parties from most major democracies for most of the post-war era. A central assumption underlying the coding of electoral platforms into quantitative data as done by the MRG/CMP is that parties take positions by selective emphases of policy objectives, which put their accomplishments in a most positive light (Budge 2001) or are representative for their current polital/ideological positions. Consequently, the MRG/CMP data consist of percentages of the respective manifesto texts that refer to various policy objectives. As a consequence both of this underlying assumption and of the structure of the CMP data, methods of classical multivariate analysis are not well suited to these data, due to the requirements to the data for an appropriate application of these methods (van der Brug 2001; Elff 2002). The paper offers an alternative method for reconstructing positions in political spaces based on latent trait modelling, which both reï¬?ects the assumptions underlying the coding of the texts and the peculiar structure of the data. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated with respect to the average position of party families within reconstructed policy spaces. It turns out that communist, socialist, and social democrat parties differ clearly from â??bourgeoisâ?? parties with regards to their positions on an economic left/right dimension, while British and Scandinavian conservative parties can be distinguished from Christian democratic parties by their respective positions on a libertarian/authoritarian and a traditionalist/modernist dimension. Similarly, the typical political positions of green (or â??New Politicsâ??) parties can be distinguished from the positions of other party families.