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Advances in Political Economy pp 369–382Cite as

Inferring Ideological Ambiguity from Survey Data

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Abstract

The chapter presents a Bayesian model for estimating ideological ambiguity of political parties from survey data. In the model, policy positions are defined as probability distributions over a policy space and survey-based party placements are treated as random draws from those distributions. A cross-classified random-effects model is employed to estimate ideological ambiguity, defined as the dispersion of the latent probability distribution. Furthermore, non-response patterns are incorporated as an additional source of information on ideological ambiguity. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is provided for parameter estimation. The usefulness of the model is demonstrated using cross-national expert survey data on party platforms.

I am grateful to John Aldrich, Scott Desposato, Jeremy Reiter, Fan Li, Mitchell Seligson, and James Stimson for comments and suggestions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, “Where are Mitt Romney’s details?”, by Scott Lehigh, Boston Globe, June 27, 2012.

  2. 2.

    ‘Obama Fuels Pullout Debate With Remarks’, New York Times, July 4, 2008.

  3. 3.

    For example, such interpretation of respondent opinions has been used in the risk analysis literature (Huyse and Thacker 2004).

  4. 4.

    Palfrey and Poole (1987) analyzed how assumption of heterogeneous variance affects inference about μ but did not address how σ should be estimated.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISM University of Management and Economics, LT-01129, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Arturas Rozenas

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  1. Arturas Rozenas
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Correspondence to Arturas Rozenas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center in Political Economy, Washington University in St.Louis, Brookings Drive 1, Saint Louis, 63130, Missouri, USA

    Norman Schofield

  2. , Faculty of Economics, University of Vigo, Lagoas Marcosende, Vigo, 36310, Spain

    Gonzalo Caballero

  3. Centro de Estudios Avanzados, en Ciencias Sociales, Juan March Institute, Calle Castelló 77, Madrid, 28006, Spain

    Daniel Kselman

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Rozenas, A. (2013). Inferring Ideological Ambiguity from Survey Data. In: Schofield, N., Caballero, G., Kselman, D. (eds) Advances in Political Economy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35239-3_18

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