Inferring ideological ambiguity from survey data

Arturas Rozenas

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

    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.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationAdvances in Political Economy
    Subtitle of host publicationInstitutions, Modelling and Empirical Analysis
    PublisherSpringer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
    Pages369-382
    Number of pages14
    Volume9783642352393
    ISBN (Electronic)9783642352393
    ISBN (Print)3642352383, 9783642352386
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Oct 1 2013

    Keywords

    • Ambiguity
    • Bayesian
    • Ideological placement
    • Latent variables
    • Missing data

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Social Sciences(all)

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