Pairwise Comparisons as a Scale Development Tool for Composite Measures

Composite scales are widely used for measuring aggregate social science concepts. These often consist of linear indices obtained as the weighted sum of a set of relevant indicators. However, selecting coefficients (or weights) that reflect the substantive importance of each indicator towards the concept of interest is a difficult task. We propose a method for the generation of linear indices for aggregate concepts based on pairwise comparisons. Specifically, we ask a group of subject-matter experts to perform a series of pairwise comparisons, with respect to the concept of interest, between profiles displaying different combinations of indicators. This allows us to estimate coefficients for each indicator that provide a linear approximation to how experts make the pairwise evaluations. As we show, the method makes it straightforward to assess intercoder reliability, while being a more accessible task than directly asking experts for coefficients. We demonstrate our method with an application to the concept of ‘productive ageing’, including a cross-cultural comparison of weighting schemes derived from a group of Italian and a group of South Korean experts on this concept

Partisan Disagreements Arising from Rationalization of Common Information

Why do opposing partisans sometimes disagree about the facts and processes that are relevant to understanding political issues? One explanation is that citizens may have a psychological tendency towards adopting beliefs about the political world that rationalize their partisan preferences. Previous quantitative evidence for rationalization playing a role in explaining partisan factual disagreement has come from cross-sectional covariation and from correction experiments. In this paper, I argue that these rationalizations can occur as side-effects when citizens change their attitudes in response to partisan cues and substantively relevant facts about a political issue. Following this logic, I motivate and report the results of a survey experiment that provides US Republicans and Democrats with information that they will be inclined to rationalize in different ways, because they have different beliefs about which political actors they should agree with. The results are a novel experimental demonstration that partisan disagreements about the political world can arise from rationalization

Republican-Majority Appellate Panels Increase Execution Rates for Capital Defendants

We use the quasi-random assignment of cases to three-judge panels on the US Courts of Appeals to assess the consistency of adjudication of death penalty appeals. We find clear evidence that panels apply different standards depending on whether a majority of the panel was appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents. Unlike previous work on panel effects in the US Courts of Appeals, we show that these effects persist to the end of the process of adjudication. Since the early 1980s, the probability of ultimate execution has been increased for inmates when their first court of appeals case was assigned to a panel with a majority of Republican appointees

Simulating Counterfactual Representation

We show how to use multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate legislative outcomes under counterfactual representation schemes that, for example, boost the representation of women or translate votes into seats differently. We apply this technique to two research questions: (1) Would the U.S. Congress be less polarized if state delegations were formed according to the principle of party proportional representation? (2) Would there have been stronger support for legalizing same-sex marriage in the U.K. House of Commons if Parliament more closely reflected the population in gender and age

Studying ideational change in Russian politics with topic models and word embeddings

Peer reviewe

Exercise Participation in Adolescents and Their Parents: Evidence for Genetic and Generation Specific Environmental Effects

Individual differences in adolescent exercise behavior are to a large extent explained by shared environmental factors. The aim of this study was to explore to what extent this shared environment represents effects of cultural transmission of parents to their offspring, generation specific environmental effects or assortative mating. Survey data on leisure-time exercise behavior were available from 3,525 adolescent twins and their siblings (13-18 years) and 3,138 parents from 1,736 families registered at the Netherlands Twin Registry. Data were also available from 5,471 adult twins, their siblings and spouses similar in age to the parents. Exercise participation (No/Yes, using a cut-off criterion of 4 metabolic equivalents and 60 min weekly) was based on questions on type, frequency and duration of exercise. A model to analyze dichotomous data from twins, siblings and parents including differences in variance decomposition across sex and generation was developed. Data from adult twins and their spouses were used to investigate the causes of assortative mating (correlation between spouses = 0.41, due to phenotypic assortment). The heritability of exercise in the adult generation was estimated at 42%. The shared environment for exercise behavior in adolescents mainly represents generation specific shared environmental influences that seem somewhat more important in explaining familial clustering in girls than in boys (52 versus 41%). A small effect of vertical cultural transmission was found for boys only (3%). The remaining familial clustering for exercise behavior was explained by additive genetic factors (42% in boys and 36% in girls). Future studies on adolescent exercise behavior should focus on identification of the generation specific environmental factors. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Simulating Counterfactual Representation

We show how to use multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate legislative outcomes under counterfactual representation schemes that e.g. boost the representation of women or translate votes into seats differently. We apply this technique to two research questions: (1) Would the U.S. Congress be less polarized if state delegations were formed according to the principle of party proportional representation? (2) Would there have been stronger support for legalizing same-sex marriage in the U.K. House of Commons if Parliament more closely reflected the population in gender and age

Pairwise comparisons as a scale development tool for composite measures

Composite scales are widely used for measuring aggregate social science concepts. These often consist of linear indices obtained as the weighted sum of a set of relevant indicators. However, selecting coefficients (or weights) that reflect the substantive importance of each indicator towards the concept of interest is a difficult task. We propose a method for the generation of linear indices for aggregate concepts based on pairwise comparisons. Specifically, we ask a group of subject-matter experts to perform a series of pairwise comparisons, with respect to the concept of interest, between profiles displaying different combinations of indicators. This allows us to estimate coefficients for each indicator that provide a linear approximation to how experts make the pairwise evaluations. As we show, the method makes it straightforward to assess intercoder reliability, while being a more accessible task than directly asking experts for coefficients. We demonstrate our method with an application to the concept of ‘productive ageing’, including a cross-cultural comparison of weighting schemes derived from a group of Italian and a group of South Korean experts on this concept