Abstract
The construction of policy spaces is a fundamental part of the analysis of voting behavior and party competition. This chapter is dedicated to the description of the relevance of measurement and operationalization of policy issues. It presents a well-grounded way how to construct policy spaces based on those measures. A survey of the current literature regarding empirical studies of spatial voting models reveals a large heterogeneity in the measures and concepts used. The consequences of different measures for the substantial interpretation of the results of models of spatial voting are often discussed in footnotes or completely ignored. Often, the measures in use rely on very different assumptions regarding the nature of the policy space, which makes a comparison of substantial results difficult. This chapter discusses the characteristics of the policy space that are relevant when it comes to analyzing party competition based on a spatial model of vote choice and critically reviews established operationalization methods. It then describes a measurement technique that allows for the construction of empirical policy spaces in which voter ideal points as well as party positions can be transferred, based on which a spatial model of voting behavior and party competition can be estimated.
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Notes
- 1.
Not to mention the missing description of their usage of the optimization algorithm, that is not adequate for analyzing competition in multi-dimensional policy spaces (Curini and Iacus 2012).
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Kurella, AS. (2017). The Construction of Policy Spaces. In: Issue Voting and Party Competition. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53378-0_5
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