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Public Opinion Shocks and Government Termination Martin, Lanny W. Uploaded 11-16-1999 Keywords government survival public opinion discrete-hazard model logit Abstract Abstract. The ability of a government to remain in power depends partially upon its vulnerability to unexpected changes occurring in the outside political environment. In this paper, I examine the relationship between government termination and changes in the electoral expectations of political parties in the legislature, as reflected by shifts in popular support for the government. I find that the decision to terminate the government is related in complex ways to changes in public opinion. Governments are more likely to collapse as certain members of the incumbent coalition expect to gain more ministerial portfolios, and in cases of minority government, when the opposition expects to gain more legislative seats. Further, I show that these effects increase with the approach of regularly-scheduled elections.

2

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When is it rational to redistribute? A cross-national examination of attitudes toward redistribution Dion, Michelle Uploaded 07-22-2010 Keywords income inequality redistribution public opinion Abstract Much political economy work on the politics of public policy and particularly redistribution builds on an assumption that individual income is negatively related to demand for redistribution. Since aggregate income inequality is not positively related to aggregate redistribution cross-nationally, various efforts seek to understand why political institutions fail to efficiently aggregate citizen preferences. This paper approaches this puzzle from a different perspective, instead seeking to understand the ways economic, social, and political context may shape preference formation and condition the individual-level relationship between income and demand for government redistribution. Using 300 country-surveys in 50 countries between 1985 and 2008 to model the relationships among country-level characteristics, individual income and support for redistribution, this paper finds evidence to suggest that not only do political institutions, inequality, and existing redistribution shape the formation of preferences, but that social diversity and dominant cultural values do as well.

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The Two Faces of Public Opinion Berinsky, Adam Uploaded 04-13-1998 Keywords public opinion selection bias item non-response social desirability bivariate probit Abstract In this paper I trace out the aggregate effects of the social forces in the survey interview that might influence the opinions which individuals express. First, I advance the "Mediated Communication" theory of the survey response, which builds on existing models of public opinion in the political science literature by accounting for effects related to the social context of the survey setting. I then discuss how the aggregation process could compound these individual-level effects to create an opinion signal which is a poor representation of the collective public's policy preferences. As an illustration of these effects and the resulting difficulties involved in measuring aggregate opinion on socially sensitive issues, I use National Elections Study (NES) data from 1990-1994 to show that public opinion polls overstate support for school integration. Specifically, individuals who harbor anti-integration sentiments are likely to hide their socially unacceptable opinions behind a mask of indifference. Finally, in order to confirm the validity of these findings, I show that the same methods which predict that opinion polls understate true opposition to government involvement in school integration also predict the results of the 1989 New York City mayoral election -- an election where the charged racial atmosphere made accurate polling difficult, if not impossible -- more accurately than the marginals of the pre-election polls taken in the weeks leading to the election. All told, these results suggests that survey questions on school integration -- and more generally questions on racial attitudes -- may provide an inaccurate picture of true public sentiment on such sensitive issues.

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Inferring Micro- from Macrolevel Change: Ecological Panel Inference in Surveys Penubarti, Mohan Schuessler, Alexander Uploaded 07-20-1998 Keywords Ecological panel inference (EPI) surveys public opinion Abstract To draw panel inferences at the microlevel from cross-sectional surveys invites an ecological inference problem. In this paper we derive from King's ecological inference solution a method of ecological panel inference (EPI) which allows researchers to estimate microlevel change from macrolevel measures of change. We verify our approach in panel data where magnitudes of microlevel change are known, and we subsequently apply and illustrate our method using public opinion data on presidential approval. EPI should be of interest to researchers seeking to explain microlevel change in the absence of microlevel data. It should equally be of interest to researchers seeking to explain macrolevel change as it makes visible to them the microlevel components that drive such aggregate-level change.

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Modeling Direction and Intensity in Ordinal Scales with Midpoints Jones, Bradford S. Sobel, Michael E. Uploaded 07-21-1998 Keywords adjacent category logit log-linear models public opinion Congress Abstract Political opinion analysts are frequently work with semantically balanced ordinal scales. Such survey items are frequently used to measure candidate evaluations, public spending preferences, positions on social issues, and candidate and party placement. Because of the special nature of these survey items (semantically balanced about a midpoint), researchers may be interested in understanding how both the response direction and response intensity varies over time and/or across covariate classes. That is, trends may be found in the tendency for respondents to choose categories above vs. below the midpoint (the response direction) and trends may be found in the tendency for respondents to choose between or among category labels above or below the midpoint. And while political analysts are commonly interested in response intensity and direction, traditional methods used to model distributions on semantically balanced ordinal scales are problematic. In this paper, we discuss a class of models originally developed by Sobel (1995, 1997, 1998) that allows researchers to simultaneously model direction and intensity in ordinal scales with midpoints. Specifically, we parameterize the model as an adjacent category logit model. Numerous parsimonious models may be arrived at that describe trends in the response direction and response intensity. Because the adjacent category logit model is linear in the logits, we estimate the model using log-linear models. We present an application of the models to data on approval ratings of House incumbents. We find that the trends in response directions (the tendency for respondents to evaluate the incumbent favorably or not favorably) increase through the 1980s, peaking in the late Eighties, and are now declining over the 1990s. With regard to response intensity, (that is, the tendency to respond in the extreme categories vs. the moderate categories), we find that intensity increases during most presidential election cycles and vanishes during midterm election years. We argue this finding is related to the different levels of political information citizens are exposed to in presidential vs. midterm election cycles.

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Direction and Intensity of Russian Macroeconomic Evaluations Jones, Bradford S. Willerton, John P. Sobel, Michael E. Uploaded 08-30-1998 Keywords Russia public opinion log linear models Abstract The Russian macroeconomy has exhibited volatility since the transformation from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. Much is known about the Russian public opinion climate during the end of the Soviet era and the beginning of the Russian Federation era; however, less well understood is the nature of Russians' macroeconomic evaluations during this on-going transformation. In this paper, we analyze Russians' assessments of the macroeconomy using Russian public opinion data asking respondents to assess the Russian national economy. We establish four testable hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that the direction of Russian opinion will be asymmetrically more negative than positive across all periods in the study. Second, we hypothesize that economic assessments will vary by residential region. Specifically, we contend the response distribution for respondents from Moscow and St. Petersburg (MSP) will differ from respondents from other residential regions. Third (and related to the second), we hypothesize that the response distributions for MSP respondents will be temporally heterogenous while the response distribution for respondents outside MSP will be temporally homogenous. Fourth, we hypothesize that despite the poor performance of the economy during the Russian Federation transition, Russian public opinion will not exhibit extreme negativity in macroeconomic evaluations. Using published survey data collected from the bi -monthly extsl{Russian Public Opinion Monitor} conducted by the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VCIOM), for the period January 1994 to July 1996, we examine both the direction and intensity of Russian opinion toward the state of the national economy by estimating the distribution on the response variable using an adjacent category logit model (Jones and Sobel 1998, Sobel 1995, 1997, 1998). From our analysis, we find first that the direction of Russians' evaluation of the macroeconomy is consistently negative rather than positive---a finding that corroborates extant research; however, the directional nature of economic assessments displays significant residential variation between MSP and the rest of the country. Second, we find significant residential variation in economic assessments. Specifically, the response distribution for MSP respondents can be distinguished from the response distribution from respondents in other residential regions, and also, the response distribution for MSP respondents displays considerable temporal heterogeneity. We argue this variability tends to follow changes in the macroeconomic and political environments. Third, we do not find support for the hypothesis of temporal homogeneity in the response distribution for respondents outside of MSP. Nevertheless, residents in other cities and in rural regions seem not to be as responsive to macroeconomic changes over the period, thus eliciting milder temporal variability than MSP respondents. Fourth, we find that in terms of the response distribution, the intensity of Russian pessimism (or optimism) is extsl{not} extreme.

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Partisanship, Political Knowledge, and Changing Economic Conditions Lawrence, Christopher Uploaded 05-18-2012 Keywords political knowledge party identification hierarchical modeling economic voting public opinion political sophistication ANES 2008-09 Panel Abstract Existing research is replete with evidence that individuals’ perceptions of the state of the economy are seemingly only loosely connected to more objective evaluations of its state and are contaminated by partisan influences. This paper provides further evidence of why these partisan influences come about, by advancing the hypothesis that citizen political knowledge moderates the effect of partisanship on economic evaluations, grounded in Zaller’s Receive-Accept-Sample model of opinion formation and articulation. The paper also advances the hypothesis that more knowledgeable partisans will respond to changes in elite messaging regarding the economy fairly rapidly after a change in control of the government. I examine these propositions using data from the ANES panel study of public opinion between January 2008 and June 2010, and find evidence affirming the essential interactive role of knowledge and partisanship in the formation and articulation of evaluations of the national economy.

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Direction and Intensity of Russian Macroeconomic Evaluations Jones, Bradford S. Willerton, John P. Sobel, Michael E. Uploaded 08-30-1998 Keywords Russia public opinion log linear models Abstract The Russian macroeconomy has exhibited volatility since the transformation from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. Much is known about the Russian public opinion climate during the end of the Soviet era and the beginning of the Russian Federation era; however, less well understood is the nature of Russians' macroeconomic evaluations during this on-going transformation. In this paper, we analyze Russians' assessments of the macroeconomy using Russian public opinion data asking respondents to assess the Russian national economy. We establish four testable hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that the direction of Russian opinion will be asymmetrically more negative than positive across all periods in the study. Second, we hypothesize that economic assessments will vary by residential region. Specifically, we contend the response distribution for respondents from Moscow and St. Petersburg (MSP) will differ from respondents from other residential regions. Third (and related to the second), we hypothesize that the response distributions for MSP respondents will be temporally heterogenous while the response distribution for respondents outside MSP will be temporally homogenous. Fourth, we hypothesize that despite the poor performance of the economy during the Russian Federation transition, Russian public opinion will not exhibit extreme negativity in macroeconomic evaluations. Using published survey data collected from the bi -monthly extsl{Russian Public Opinion Monitor} conducted by the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VCIOM), for the period January 1994 to July 1996, we examine both the direction and intensity of Russian opinion toward the state of the national economy by estimating the distribution on the response variable using an adjacent category logit model (Jones and Sobel 1998, Sobel 1995, 1997, 1998). From our analysis, we find first that the direction of Russians' evaluation of the macroeconomy is consistently negative rather than positive---a finding that corroborates extant research; however, the directional nature of economic assessments displays significant residential variation between MSP and the rest of the country. Second, we find significant residential variation in economic assessments. Specifically, the response distribution for MSP respondents can be distinguished from the response distribution from respondents in other residential regions, and also, the response distribution for MSP respondents displays considerable temporal heterogeneity. We argue this variability tends to follow changes in the macroeconomic and political environments. Third, we do not find support for the hypothesis of temporal homogeneity in the response distribution for respondents outside of MSP. Nevertheless, residents in other cities and in rural regions seem not to be as responsive to macroeconomic changes over the period, thus eliciting milder temporal variability than MSP respondents. Fourth, we find that in terms of the response distribution, the intensity of Russian pessimism (or optimism) is extsl{not} extreme.

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The Hidden American Immigration Consensus: A Conjoint Analysis of Attitudes Toward Immigrants Hainmueller, Jens Hopkins, Daniel Uploaded 07-14-2012 Keywords immigration public opinion conjoint analysis Abstract With immigration a salient issue, it is critical to understand Americans' attitudes toward immigrants. Past research points to several immigrant characteristics, both cultural and economic, that might influence attitudes. Yet it has not tested the competing hypotheses comprehensively. This paper uses a statistical tool from marketing---choice-based conjoint analysis---to test the relative influence of nine randomized immigrant attributes in generating support for admission. Drawing on a two-wave Knowledge Networks survey, it demonstrates that Americans view educated immigrants in high-status jobs favorably, while they view those who lack plans to work, have previously entered without authorization, or do not speak English unfavorably. Consistent with norms-based and sociotropic explanations, the immigrants most likely to be admitted are those expected to contribute economically and to comply with norms about work and assimilation. Remarkably, these preferences vary little with respondents' education, partisanship, or other attributes. Beneath partisan divisions over immigration lies a consensus about which immigrants to admit.

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Liberalism, Public Opinion, and their Critics: Some Lessons for Defending Science Jackman, Simon Uploaded 00-00-0000 Keywords liberalism science Enlightenment statistics public opinion post-modernism Abstract Science and liberalism were both born out of the Enlightenment; liberalism's more-or-less successful defense against its critics may hold some insights for defenders of science against recent attacks. Liberalism, like science, is normatively thin, but procedurally rich. As such, liberalism and science has been able to accomodate shifting opinions about "the good" or "the truth" while pursuing it. For both science and liberalism, truth and "the good" are socially constructed, just as they themselves are socially constructed. This is sometimes overlooked. A brief history of the study of public opinion shows that liberalism's science -- political science, and the study of public opinion in particular -- is full of abstractions, metaphors, and approxiimations of reality that serve social ends. This can be used to disarm post-modern critics of science. The admission of a conetextualized basis for knowledge is not an abandonment of science, but rather an acknowledgement of the richness of the world, that is, if anything, an invitation to inquiry. This admission was the mutual origin of both science and liberalism, is the source of the their resiliance, and will ensure their safe passage throught the post-modern "storm".

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Dynamic Bayesian Forecasting of Presidential Elections in the States Linzer, Drew Uploaded 07-16-2012 Keywords President Forecasting Public Opinion Elections Abstract I present a dynamic Bayesian forecasting model that enables early and accurate prediction of U.S. presidential election outcomes at the state level. The method systematically combines information from historical forecasting models in real time with results from the large number of state-level opinion surveys that are released publicly during the campaign. The result is a set of forecasts that are initially as good as the historical model, then gradually increase in accuracy as Election Day nears. I employ a hierarchical specification to overcome the limitation that not every state is polled on every day, allowing the model to borrow strength both across states and, through the use of random-walk priors, across time. The model also filters away day-to-day variation in the polls due to sampling error and national campaign eects, which enables daily tracking of voter preferences towards the presidential candidates at the state and national levels. Simulation techniques are used to estimate the candidates' probability of winning each state and, consequently, a majority of votes in the Electoral College. I apply the model to pre-election polls from the 2008 presidential campaign and demonstrate that the victory of Barack Obama was never realistically in doubt. The model is currently ready to be deployed for forecasting the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. Project website: votamatic.org

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The Economic Sophistication of Public Opinion in the United States Sekhon, Jasjeet Uploaded 09-18-1997 Keywords Public Opinion Economic Sophistication Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior (SCAB) Natural Rate of Unemployment NAIRU Unemployment Bootstrap Bootstrap Confidence Region Abstract I show that the public does indeed have coherent and sophisticated reactions to macroeconomic variables. These reactions are consistent with economic theory. Individuals form evaluations and expectations in a way which is sensitive to the complex trade-off between unemployment and inflation as determined by the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). The primary dataset used in this analysis has 69,680 observations and is compiled by merging 113 individual level ``Surveys of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior'' from 1976:01 to 1991:12. The data analysis makes extensive use of bootstrap methods to create confidence regions and to conduct hypothesis tests.

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Pauline, the Mainstream, and Political Elites: the place of race in Australian political ideology Jackman, Simon Uploaded 08-25-1997 Keywords public opinion political ideology political elites race immigration Australian politics factor analysis ideological locations density estimation plotting highest density regions Abstract An often heard claim in the current ``race debate'' is that Australia's major political parties are out of touch with ``mainstream'' Australia on issues related to race. Parallel surveys of the electorate and candidates in the 1996 Federal election allow this claim to be tested, with items tapping general ideological dispositions, but including questions about Aboriginal Australians, immigration, and links with Asia. I make three critical findings: egin{itemize} item the electorate holds quite conservative opinions on these issues relative to the candidates, and is quite distant from ALP candidates in particular; item attitudes on racial issues are a powerful component of the electorate's otherwise relatively loosely organized political ideology, so much so that any categorisation of Australian political ideology ignoring race must be considered incomplete; item racial attitudes cut across other components of the electorate's ideology, placing all the parties under internal ideological strains, but the ALP appears particularly vulnerable on this score. end{itemize} While the data show the Coalition to be the net beneficiary of the ideological tensions posed by race, the formation of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party has exposed the Coalition's vulnerability to race as a cross-cutting political issue. Racial issues thus have many characteristics of a realigning dimension in Australian politics.

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Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multi-Dimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments Hainmueller, Jens Hopkins, Daniel Yamamoto, Teppei Uploaded 12-12-2012 Keywords potential outcomes average marginal component effects fractional factorial design orthogonal design randomized design survey experiments public opinion vote choice immigration Abstract For decades, market researchers have used conjoint analysis to understand how consumers make decisions when faced with multi-dimensional choices. In such analyses, respondents are asked to score or rank a set of alternatives, where each alternative is defined by multiple attributes which are varied randomly or intentionally. Political scientists are frequently interested in parallel questions about decision-making, yet to date conjoint analysis has seen little use within the field. In this manuscript, we demonstrate the potential value of conjoint analysis in political science, using examples about vote choice and immigrant admission to the United States. In doing so, we develop a set of statistical tools for drawing causal conclusions from stated preference data based on the potential outcomes framework of causal inference. We discuss the causal estimands of interest and provide a formal analysis of the assumptions required for identifying those quantities. Prior conjoint analyses have typically used designs which limit the number of unique conjoint profiles. We employ a survey experiment to compare this approach to a fully randomized approach. Both our formal analysis of the causal estimands and our empirical results highlight the potential biases of common approaches to conjoint analysis which restrict the number of profiles.

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Paper

The "Miracle" Revisited: An Examination of The Micro-Foundations of Aggregate Public Opinion Berinsky, Adam Uploaded 08-18-1997 Keywords public opinion heteroskedastic probit ordered probit selection bias item non-response Abstract One of the best-known findings in the public opinion literature is that individual responses to survey questions, by and large, both exhibit little constraint and are highly unstable over time. One response to this bleak finding has been to search for coherence and stability at the aggregate level. Scholars who adopt this approach -- most notably Page and Shapiro (1992) -- argue that though most individuals are poorly informed about politics and may have unstable attitudes, the "miracle TRUNCATED.

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Paper

Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state:What's the matter with Connecticut? Gelman, Andrew Shor, Boris Bafumi, Joseph Park, David Uploaded 11-29-2005 Keywords availability heuristic ecological fallacy hierarchical model income and voting multilevel model presidential elections public opinion secret weapon varying-slope model Abstract We find that income matters more in ``red America'' than in ``blue America.'' In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference. In addition to finding this pattern and studying its changes over time, we use the concepts of typicality and availability from cognitive psychology to explain how these patterns can be commonly misunderstood. Our results can be viewed either as a debunking of the journalistic image of rich ``latte'' Democrats and poor ``Nascar'' Republicans, or as support for the journalistic images of political and cultural differences between red and blue states---differences which are not explained by differences in individuals' incomes. For decades, the Democrats have been viewed as the party of the poor, with the Republicans representing the rich. Recent presidential elections, however, have shown a reverse pattern, with Democrats performing well in the richer ``blue'' states in the northeast and west coast, and Republicans dominating in the ``red'' states in the middle of the country. Through multilevel modeling of individual-level survey data and county- and state-level demographic and electoral data, we reconcile these patterns. Key methods used in this research are: (1) plots of repeated cross-sectional analyses, (2) varying-intercept, varying-slope multilevel models, and (3) a graph that simultaneously shows within-group and between-group patterns in a multilevel model. These statistical tools help us understand patterns of variation within and between states in a way that would not be possible from classical regressions or by looking at tables of coefficient estimates.

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Paper

The Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule Zorn, Christopher Gill, Jeff Uploaded 03-21-2004 Keywords baseball designated hitter public opinion ideology selection model Abstract Since its introduction in 1973, major league baseball’s designated hitter (DH) rule has been the subject of continuing controversy. Here, we investigate the political and socio–demographic determinants of public opinion towards baseball’s DH rule, using data from a nationwide poll conducted during September, 1997. Our findings suggest that, while both self–proclaimed Democrats and Republicans are more likely to follow baseball than are political independents, it is Democrats, not Republicans, who tend to favor the DH. In addition, older respondents were more likely to oppose the rule, while respondents from the Midwest tended to favor it.

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Presidential Approval: the case of George W. Bush Beck, Nathaniel Jackman, Simon Rosenthal, Howard Uploaded 07-19-2006 Keywords presidential approval public opinion polls house effects dynamic linear model Bayesian statistics Markov chain Monte Carlo state space pages of killer graphs Abstract We use a Bayesian dynamic linear model to track approval for George W. Bush over time. Our analysis deals with several issues that have been usually addressed separately in the extant literature. First, our analysis uses polling data collected at a higher frequency than is typical, using over 1,100 published national polls, and data on macro-economic conditions collected at the weekly level. By combining this much poll information, we are much better poised to examine the public's reactions to events over shorter time scales than can the typical analysis of approval that utilizes monthly or quarterly approval. Second, our statistical modeling explicitly deals with the sampling error of these polls, as well as the possibility of bias in the polls due to house effects. Indeed, quite aside from the question of ``what drives approval?'', there is considerable interest in the extent to which polling organizations systematically diverge from one another in assessing approval for the president. These bias parameters are not only necessary parts of any realistic model of approval that utilizes data from multiple polling organizations, but easily estimated via the Bayesian dynamics linear model.

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Paper

The Macro Mechanics of Social Capital Keele, Luke Uploaded 10-15-2003 Keywords social capital time series public opinion Abstract Interest in social capital has grown as it has become apparent that it is an important predictor of collective well-being. Recently, however, attention has shifted to how levels of social capital have changed over time. But focusing on how a society moves from one level of social capital to another requires that we alter current theory. In particular, by moving to the context of temporal change, we must not treat it as a lumpy concept with general causes and effects. Instead, we need a theory that explains the macro mechanics between civic activity and interpersonal trust. In the following analysis, I develop a macro theory of social capital through a careful delineation of the social capital aggregation process which demonstrates that we should expect civic engagement to affect interpersonal trust over time with the reverse not being true. Then, I develop and use new longitudinal measures of civic engagement and interpersonal trust to test the direction of causality between the two components of social capital. Finally, I model civic engagement as a function of resources and demonstrate how the decline in civic engagement has adversely affected levels of interpersonal trust over the last thirty years.

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Paper

Should the Democrats move to the left on economic policy? Gelman, Andrew Uploaded 09-20-2006 Keywords median voter Presidential election public opinion spatial model of voting Abstract Could John Kerry have gained votes in the recent Presidential election by more clearly distinguishing himself from George Bush on economic policy? At first thought, the logic of political preferences would suggest not: the Republicans are to the right of most Americans on economic policy, and so in a one-dimensional space with party positions measured with no error, the optimal strategy for the Democrats would be to stand infinitesimally to the left of the Republicans. The median voter theorem suggests that each party should keep its policy positions just barely distinguishable from the opposition. In a multidimensional setting, however, or when voters vary in their perceptions of the parties' positions, a party can benefit from putting some daylight between itself and the other party on an issue where it has a public-opinion advantage (such as economic policy for the Democrats). We set up a plausible theoretical model in which the Democrats could achieve a net gain in votes by moving to the left on economic policy, given the parties' positions on a range of issue dimensions. We then evaluate this model based on survey data on voters' perceptions of their own positions and those of the candidates in 2004. Under our model, it turns out to be optimal for the Democrats to move slightly to the {em right} but staying clearly to the left of the Republicans' current position on economic issues.

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State-Level Opinions from National Surveys: Poststratification using Hierarchical Logistic Regression Park, David K. Gelman, Andrew Bafumi, Joseph Uploaded 07-12-2002 Keywords Bayesian Inference Hierarchical Logit Poststratification Public Opinion States Elections Abstract Previous researchers have pooled national surveys in order to construct state-level opinions. However, in order to overcome the small n problem for less populous states, they have aggregated a decade or more of national surveys to construct their measures. For example, Erikson, Wright and McIver (1993) pooled 122 national surveys conducted over 13 years to produce state-level partisan and ideology estimates. Brace, Sims-Butler, Arceneaux, and Johnson (2002) pooled 22 surveys over a 25-year period to produce state-level opinions on a number of specific issues. We construct a hierarchical logistic regression model for the mean of a binary response variable conditional on poststratification cells. This approach combines the modeling approach often used in small-area estimation with the population information used in poststratification (see Gelman and Little 1997). We produce state-level estimates pooling seven national surveys conducted over a nine-day period. We first apply the method to a set of U.S pre-election polls, poststratified by state, region, as well as the usual demographic variables and evaluate the model by comparing it to state-level election outcomes. We then produce state-level partisan and ideology estimates by comparing it to Erikson, Wright and McIver's estimates.

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Paper

Should Voters be Encyclopedias? Measuring the Political Sophistication of Survey Respondents Lawrence, Christopher Uploaded 12-23-2006 Keywords political sophistication public opinion item-response theory models political knowledge measurement NES DPES Abstract In this paper, I apply item-response theory models to the problem of measuring the political sophistication of survey respondents in the United States and the Netherlands, discuss the advantages of IRT models over traditional measurement techniques (additive indices, interviewer evaluations) for second-stage analysis, and demonstrate the construct validity of the IRT-based measures. I also demonstrate the relative performance of knowledge items and items constructed from party/candidate relative placement questions on both the NES and DPES.

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Paper

Public Opinion During The Vietnam War: A Revised Measure Of The Public Will Berinsky, Adam Uploaded 04-02-2001 Keywords non-response public opinion Abstract The conception of opinion polls as "broadly representative" of public sentiment has long pervaded academic and popular discussions of polls. In 1939, polling pioneer George Gallup advanced the virtues of surveys as a means for political elites to assess the collective "mandate of the people." If properly designed and conducted, Gallup argued, polls would act as a "sampling referendum" and provide a more accurate measure of popular opinion than more traditional methods, such as reading mail from constituents and attending to newspapers (see also Gallup and Rae 1940; for a contrary view, see Ginsberg 1986, Herbst 1993). More recently, Verba has argued, "sample surveys provide the closest approximation to an unbiased representation of the public because participation in a survey requires no resources and because surveys eliminate the bias inherent in the fact that participants in politics are self-selected -- surveys produce just what democracy is supposed to produce -- equal representation of all citizens"(1996, 3). Thus, while surveys may be limited in several respects they appear to provide a requisite egalitarian compliment to traditional forms of political participation. Through opinion polls, the voice of "the people," writ broadly, may be heard. Or maybe not. In this paper, I reconsider this conventional wisdom. Specifically, I demonstrate that the imbalance in political rhetoric surrounding the Vietnam War disadvantaged those groups who were the natural opponents of the War. I investigate the effect of accounting for "don't know" responses on the shape of public opinion on the Vietnam issue using a number of datasets from the 1960s and early 1970s and find that analyses that use very different data sources converge to the same conclusion. The process of collecting opinion on Vietnam excluded a dovish segment of the population from the collective opinion signal in the early part of the war. However, this bias shrank over time as anti-war messages became more common in the public sphere. To use the language of Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, the "voice" of those who abstained from the Vietnam questions was different from those who responded to such items. So while there may indeed have been a "silent majority" -- as President Nixon maintained during the early years of his presidency -- it was a majority that opposed, rather than supported, the war.

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Paper

Research Opportunities - The 2009/10 British Election Study Clarke, Harold Sanders, David Stewart, Marianne Whiteley, Paul Uploaded 07-07-2008 Keywords electons experiments in-person internet public opinion Abstract The 2009/10 British Election Study (BES) will include significant research opportunities for students of voting, elections and public opinion. The BES will have three major components: (a) in-person pre-post election surveys; (b) rolling campaign internet panel survey (RCPS); (c) 48 inter-election monthly continuous monitoring surveys (CMS) with annual panel components. Each CMS survey will offer researchers opportunities to include question batteries including experiments. Participation is free and data release is very fast. Proposals for research modules reviewed by BES Advisory Board and P.I.s. Proposals also entertained for research modules on core and RCPS components.

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Paper

Stability and Change in State Electorates, Carter through Clinton Erikson, Robert S. Wright, Gerald C. McIver, John P. Holian, David B. Uploaded 04-25-2000 Keywords partisanship political ideology public opinion state electorates Abstract This paper extends the time series and advances the argument presented in _Statehouse Democracy_, which provided a public opinion basis for the study of state politics. The analysis covers the dynamics of partisanship and ideology in state electorates from 1977 through 1999. Incorporating the Bush and Clinton years allows for a number of conclusions. In the aggregate, state partisanship changed over the course of the last two presidential administrations, but state ideology did not. However, this change was not uniform across the country, but differed by region and resulted in higher levels of polarization between party and ideological identifications. Finally, consistent with the findings in _Statehouse Democracy_, state partisanship and

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Paper

Public Opinion and Senate Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees Kastellec, Jonathan Lax, Jeffrey Phillips, Justin Uploaded 08-22-2008 Keywords Supreme Court nominations public opinion multilevel models poststratification Abstract We study the relationship between state-level public opinion and the roll call votes of senators on Supreme Court nominees. Applying recent advances in multilevel modeling, we use national polls on nine recent Supreme Court nominees to produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of each nominee in all 50 states. We show that greater public support strongly increases the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even after controlling for standard predictors of roll call voting. We also find that the impact of opinion varies with context: it has a greater effect on opposition party senators, on ideologically opposed senators, and for generally weak nominees. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.

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Poster

Latent Variables and Rolling Panels: A New Approach to Modeling Campaign Effects Therriault, Andrew Uploaded 07-27-2011 Keywords panel data latent variables campaign effects advertising persuasion public opinion voters elections Abstract Election panels which reinterview participants in rolling cross-sectional surveys offer new opportunities to study campaign effects, but also present unique methodological challenges. I develop an original approach to modeling this data, and demonstrate how its application leads to much stronger evidence for informing and persuasion effects from campaign ads than that found in existing research

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Poster

Testing Theoretical Structures of Mass Preferences Jackson, Natalie Uploaded 08-01-2011 Keywords public opinion path analysis multidimensional scaling ideology mass preferences Abstract This project applies path analysis and multidimensional scaling models to complex, interrelated theoretical concepts to investigate the causal origins of policy preferences in the mass public. Ideology, in the sense of the liberal-conservative continuum, has often been used to explain policy preferences in the mass public with considerable success, but the causal origins of ideology are unclear due to the complexity of the concept. In this project, a theoretical model is developed that posits that ideology is created from, and therefore caused by, culture, as defined by and operationalized in the Cultural Theory framework developed by Douglas and Wildavsky (1982). However, the theoretical relationship between culture and ideology is different for those who consider themselves "liberal" or "conservative" (the ideologues) than it is for those who consider themselves "moderate" or non-ideologues. Ideologues will demonstrate a strong direct relationship between ideology and preferences, whereas moderates' preferences will be more directly related to their culture than ideology. Additionally, the concepts of culture and ideology should be more spatially similar for moderates than for ideologues since moderates are less likely to make strong distinctions between political views and their overall worldviews. This poster applies path analysis to determine which direct and indirect relationships are strongest between culture, ideology, and preferences. Multidimensional scaling analysis is then used to examine the spatial configuration of the constructs for moderates and ideologues.

29

Poster

A Split Population Model for Middle-Category Inflation in Ordered Survey Responses Bagozzi, Benjamin Uploaded 08-01-2011 Keywords split-population models ordered dependent Variables survey data Europe public opinion Abstract Recent research find that, for social desirability reasons, uninformed individuals disproportionately give ``neither agree nor disagree'' type responses to survey attitude questions, even when a ``don't know'' option is available (Sturgis et al. 2010). Such ``face-saving don't knows'' inflate the indifference (i.e. middle) categories of ordered attitude variables with non-ordered responses. When this inflation occurs within one's dependent variable, estimates from ordered probit/logit models are biased and inefficient. This poster develops a set of mixture models (the middle-inflated ordered probit with and without correlated errors) that estimate and account for the presence of ``face-saving'' responses in middle-categories of ordered survey response variables, and applies these models to (1) simulated data and (2) a commonly studied survey question measuring support for EU-membership among EU-candidate countries. Findings suggest that, when middle-category inflation is present in one's ordered dependent variable, the estimates obtained from middle-category mixture models are less biased than---and in some cases substantively distinct from---the estimates obtained from ``naive'' ordered probit models.

30

Poster

Comparing Opinions and Preferences across States and Regions: The Fallacy of using Ideological Responses Cormack, Lindsey Nagler, Jonathan Uploaded 07-20-2012 Keywords ideology polarization public opinion Abstract We are interested in differences in ideology and preferences on policies across red and blue states, and across people who say they are liberals versus conservatives. We make several points about measurement of ideology and issue preferences, all in the context of `polarization'. First, the use of ideology for measuring polarization is quite dangerous as the typical ideology question has no fixed scale -- allowing respondents to interpret it quite differently across regions or groups. Second, ideology also has a potential dimensionality problem: it is fundamentally a projection of many dimensions (or issues) onto one dimension, thus allowing respondents to weight lower level dimensions differently across regions or groups. Taken together, this suggests that an electorate may be polarized on some issues, but not on other issues. This could be because the issues exist on distinct dimensions. Or, we could find issues that lie on the same dimensions, but some are simply more discriminating than others. In such cases, `polarization' would exist on the more discriminating issue, but not on the less-discriminating issue. Thus polarization, in the absence of a clear definition, will likely to continue to exist in the eye of the beholder.