Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

The past few years have seen the advent and proliferation of Voting Advice (or Aid) Applications (VAAs), which offer voting advice on the basis of calculating the ideological congruence between citizens and political actors. Although VAA data have often been used to test many empirical questions regarding voting behaviour and political participation, we know little about the approaches used by VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. This article presents the most common aspects of the VAA approach and examines some methodological issues regarding the phrasing of statements, the format of response scales, the reliability of coding statements into response scales and the reliability and validity of scaling items into dimensions. The article argues that VAAs have a lot of potential but there is also much space for methodological improvements, and therefore concludes with some recommendations for designing VAAs

Who Do European Parties Represent? How Western European Parties Represent the Policy Preferences of Opinion Leaders

Several recent studies explore how American politicians represent the policy views of subconstituencies within the electorate. We extend this perspective to 12 West European democracies over the period 1973- 2002 to examine how mainstream parties responded to electoral subconstituencies. We find that parties were highly responsive to the views of opinion leaders, i.e., citizens who regularly engaged in political discussions and persuasion; by contrast we find no evidence that other types of voters substantively influenced parties policy programmes. We also identify significant time lags in mainstream parties responses to opinion leaders policy beliefs. Our findings have interesting implications for subconstituency representation, for understanding parties internal policymaking processes, and for spatial modeling. © 2009 Copyright Southern Political Science Association

Political opinion dynamics in social networks: The Portuguese 2010-11: Case study

The research on opinion dynamics in social networks and opinion influence models often suffer from a lack of grounding in social theories as well as deficient empirical data validation. The current availability of large datasets, and the ease we can now collect social data from the Internet, makes validation of theoretical social models a less difficult task. Starting by a state-of-the-art of the research and practice concerning political opinion dynamics in social networks, we identify the main strengths and weaknesses of this domain. We then propose a novel method for uncovering political opinion dynamics using on-line data gathering. The method includes three distinct phases: (1) data collection, (2) multi-agent modelling (3) validation. Specifically, we tested the significance of both Social Impact Theory, originally proposed by Latané (1981), and Brownian Agent modelling, proposed by Schweitzer (2002), for characterizing political opinion formation during electoral periods. These two models were tested using more than 100.000 tweets collected during the periods from the 30th of October to the 21st of January 2011 and from the 27th of March to the 6th of June 2011, concerning the Portuguese presidential and legislative elections occurred in 2011. Following the data collection, two distinct on-line communities were inspected: the general Twitter user community, and the traditional news media Twitter feeds. The opinion dynamics was simulated with grid adjustment of model parameters. This operation was performed on separate empirical series, respecting the talk about the six electoral candidates and parties. The complete process allowed concluding about the explanatory power of Social Impact Theory and Brownian Agents, and, on the other side, allowed characterizing opinion dynamics in this specific case study. This article details each phase of the method, illustrated using the dataset available at http://work.theobservatorium.eu/presid2011.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Does Voting History Matter? Analysing Persistence in Turnout

Individuals who vote in one election are also more likely to vote in the next. Modelling the causal relationship between past and current voting decisions however is intrinsically difficult, as this positive association can exist due to habit formation or unobserved heterogeneity. This paper overcomes this problem using longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study (NCDS) to examine voter turnout across three elections. It distinguishes between unobserved heterogeneity caused by fixed individual characteristics and the initial conditions problem, which occurs when voting behaviour in a previous, but unobserved, period influences current voting behaviour. It finds that controlling for fixed effects unobserved heterogeneity has little impact on the estimated degree of habit in voter turnout, however failing to control for initial conditions reduces the estimate by a half. The results imply that voting in one election increases the probability of voting in a subsequent election by 13%.Voter turnout, habit formation, dynamic panel models

Why is Voting Habit-Forming: Evidence from Sweden

For decades, scholars of electoral behavior have noted persistence in individuals' turnout decisions and hypothesized that such persistence is the result of habit. Recent empirical studies provide persuasive evidence supporting the habitual voting hypothesis, but we still do not know why individuals develop habits for voting. One theory is that voting causes individuals' to view themselves as "voters," increasing their future probabilities of voting. Another theory asserts that voting may ease institutional barriers, making future voting less costly and changing conative attitudes towards voting. This study seeks to disentangle these two causal mechanisms by testing the habitual voting hypothesis in Sweden. Since institutional barriers to voting are minimal in Sweden, evidence in favor of the habitual voting hypothesis will lend credence to a psychological mechanism. The opposite result will point to an institutional mechanism. Ultimately, habitual voting is found in Sweden, which suggests the psychological mechanism is valid

Delayed Doves: MPC Voting Behaviour of Externals

The use of independent committees for the setting of interest rates, such as the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at the Bank of England, is quickly becoming the norm in developed economies. In this paper we examine the issue of appointing external members (members who are outside the staff of the central bank) to these committees. We construct a model of MPC voting behaviour, and show that members who begin voting for similar interest rates should not systematically diverge from each other at any future point. However, econometric results in fact show that external members initially vote in line with internal members, but after a year, begin voting for substantially lower interest rates. The robustness of this effect to including member fixed effects provides strong evidence that externals behave differently from internals because of institutional differences between the groups, and not some unobserved heterogeneity. We then examine whether career concerns can explain these findings, and conclude that they cannot.Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), Bank of England, Committee Voting,Signalling