Simulating Party Competition and Vote Decision under Mixed Member Electoral Systems

This paper proposes an interactive mechanism between both tiers of mixed-member electoral systems to explain high-level linkage in West Germany, that is, the dominance of district races by the candidates of the two largest parties at the national level. The distinctive feature of the model lies in interactive effects in terms of expectation formation. That is, voters under mixed systems are assumed to utilize national-level PR results to form expectations which, in turn, are used to vote strategically in the plurality tier. To sort out the independent effect of these kinds of interactions, this paper develops a computational model and examines its simulation results.Agent-based modelling, mixed-member electoral systems, strategic voting

Stata goes BUGS (via R)

Recently, Bayesian methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques have found more use in the social sciences, with (Win)BUGS being one of the most widely applied programs for this kind of analysis. Unfortunately, because of the absence of MCMC techniques and any interfaces to WinBUGS or BUGS in Stata, Stata users who apply MCMC techniques have to perform such painful tasks as reformatting data themselves. As a preliminary solution to this problem, one can call another statistical software R within Stata and use it as an interface to (Win)BUGS. This presentation outlines this solution, providing a thorough analysis.

Do campaign posters trigger voting based on looks? Probing an explanation for why good-looking candidates win more votes

Numerous studies document that better-looking candidates win more votes. Yet the causal mechanisms leading to this advantage remain unexplored. We consider for the first time a potential trigger of the looks - vote association that has previously been suggested but not tested in the literature: exposure to campaign posters of the candidates. We test this explanation with German election survey data, which we augment with ratings - provided by MTurk workers from the U.S. - of the attractiveness and facial competence of about 1,000 district candidates. Confirming previous studies on Germany, we find that attractiveness is positively associated with candidate vote share (1.2 ppts. min-max). At the voter level, we find tentative evidence for the idea that the association is moderated by exposure to campaign posters: effects are in the expected directions and their sizes consistent with what we observe at the candidate level, but we cannot always reject the null hypothesis of no effect. In contrast to attractiveness, we do not find conclusive evidence for an effect of facial competence in the election considered. These preliminary results suggest that inundating voters with candidate posters, as in elections in Germany and many other places, might be a reason for voting based on looks

Die große Koalition in Österreich: Schwierigkeiten bei der Bildung, Stabilität und Alternativenlosigkeit

'Dieser Artikel untersucht die Koalitionsbildung in Österreich nach der Nationalratswahl 2006. Der Koalitionsbildungsprozess war insofern mit Schwierigkeiten behaftet, als keine der möglichen Mehrheitskoalitionen von allen der benötigten Parteien angestrebt wurde. Mit speziellem Fokus auf die große Koalition aus SPÖ und ÖVP, die sich letztendlich bildete, gehen die Verfasser den Fragen nach, inwiefern die Schwierigkeiten bei der Bildung durch die Konstellation der Politikpräferenzen der Parteien erklärbar sind, inwiefern diese Koalition ein stabiles Ergebnis darstellt und ob weitere andere Bündnisse über die rein rechnerische Mehrheit hinaus Alternativen darstellen. Die Verfasser verwenden für ihre Analyse ein koalitionstheoretisches Modell, das sowohl die Ämter- als auch die Politikmotivation der Parteien berücksichtigt. Ergebnis der Analyse der Verfasser ist, dass es keine Koalition gibt, die gemäß der hier verwendeten Koalitionstheorie eine stabile Gleichgewichtslösung darstellt, was die schwierigen Koalitionsverhandlungen erklärt. Die Analysen zeigen aber auch, dass die Alternativen zur großen Koalition nur unter unwahrscheinlichen Bedingungen überhaupt rationale Strategien der Parteien darstellen, so dass mangels Alternativen der großen Koalition eine gewisse Stabilität bescheinigt werden kann.' (Autorenreferat)'In this article the authors analyze the coalition building process in Austria after the general election of 2006. This process was in this respect complicated as none of the possible winning coalitions were preferred by all involved parties. With a particular regard to the actually formed grand coalition of SPÖ and ÖVP this paper aims to answer following questions: To what extent can the preference constellation of Austrian political parties explain the difficult coalition formation process? How stable is this game's outcome, the grand coalition? Did any further coalitions have a realistic chance to be formed? To this end, the authors use a coalition-theoretic model which considers an office-oriented as well as policy-oriented motivation of actors. According to the empirical results, there is no coalition which is in a stable equilibrium, which confirms the difficult situation for coalition formation. Their analysis also shows that the grand coalition fulfils more likely conditio sine qua non for all participating parties than other alternative winning coalitions. Most of three-party coalitions can be less likely formed since at least one of the parties prefers with a high probability to be in the opposition than in the coalition. Due to the absence of alternative coalitions, the authors conclude a certain stability of the grand coalition.' (author's abstract)

Die Generierung von Parteipositionen aus vorverschlüsselten Wahlprogrammen für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1949-2002)

Die Autoren beschäftigen sich in diesem Artikel mit Methoden, um aus vorverschlüsselten Wahlprogrammen in Form von CMP-Daten die Präferenzen von Parteien in räumlichen Modellen herzuleiten. Sie diskutieren mehrere Möglichkeiten, von denen sie zwei für besonders geeignet halten. Die eine der beiden Methoden entspricht vor allem der Logik von Richtungsmodellen, die andere genügt der positionalen Logik von Distanzmodellen. Die Autoren führen diese Methoden für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1949-2002) durch und weisen zusätzlich die Konfidenzintervalle aus. Mehrere Tests zeigen die Robustheit dieser Methoden. [Autorenreferat

Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters: Improving Likelihood-based Methods to Provide Unbiased Estimates and Accurate Inference

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with few upper-level units. In this article, the authors seek to rectify this negative assessment. First, they show that ML estimators of coefficients are unbiased in linear multilevel models. The apparent bias in coefficient estimates found by Stegmueller can be attributed to Monte Carlo Error and a flaw in the design of his simulation study. Secondly, they demonstrate how inferential problems can be overcome by using restricted ML estimators for variance parameters and a t-distribution with appropriate degrees of freedom for statistical inference. Thus, accurate multilevel analysis is possible within the framework that most practitioners are familiar with, even if there are only a few upper-level units

Nähe und Richtung als Kriterien der Politikwahl: Probleme der empirischen Messung am Beispiel deutscher Bundestagswahlen

"Nähe und Richtung können als Kriterien der Wahlentscheidung in einem Politikraum dienen, der sich aus den wahrgenommenen Parteipositionen und der eigenen Einstellung der Wähler zu politischen Sachfragen (Issues) bilden lässt. Ist man ursprünglich allein vom Nähemodell in der Tradition von Downs (1968) ausgegangen, haben Rabinowitz und Macdonald (1989) argumentiert, die Wähler unterschieden nur grob, ob sie für oder gegen eine bestimmte Politik seien, und wählten dann die Partei, die ihre bevorzugte Politik am intensivsten vertrete. Diese verschiedenen Auffassungen des Politikraums werden zum Problem, wenn man beide Kriterien in einem gemischten Modell verbindet. In dem Beitrag wird gezeigt, dass es Verhaltenstheorien wie die Diskontierungstheorie von Grofman (1985) gibt, die Nähe und Richtung widerspruchsfrei als Wahlkriterien für einen einheitlich aufgefassten Politikraum verbinden. Am Beispiel von Sachfragen bei den Bundestagswahlen 1980, 1987, 1994 und 1998 wird gezeigt, dass die Erklärungskraft des Grofman-Modells genauso gut ist wie die eines gemischten Modells, das aber den Nachteil einer inkonsistenten Konzeption des Politikraums hat. Empirisch unterscheiden sich die Modelle in der Festlegung des Bezugspunkts für das Richtungskriterium. Bei Grofman ist dies die Position des Status quo auf den verwendeten Policyskalen, bei Rabinowitz und Macdonald ist es der mittlere Skalenwert, der als Ankerpunkt für die Präferenzrichtung dient." (Autorenreferat)"Proximity and direction can be applied as criteria for the best decision in a policy space constructed from perceived party positions and voters' preferences for a set of political issues. The mainstream assumption in the tradition of Downs (1968) has long been that voters choose the most proximate party. Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989) have built an alternative theory based on the assumption that voters distinguish only whether they are for or against a certain policy and choose that party which is the most intensive advocate of their favored policy. These different conceptions of a policy space become problematic if the two criteria of proximity and direction are combined in a mixed model. In this paper we discuss alternative theories, termed by us as unified models, which combine the two criteria consistently, our main example being the discounting theory of Grofman (1985). We show for issues from the Bundestag elections of 1980, 1987, 1994 and 1998 that the explanatory power of the Grofman theory is as good as that of mixed models which have the disadvantage of conceptualizing the policy space inconsistently. Empirically the two theories vary with respect to the used reference point on the issue scales. Grofman uses the status quo which determines the direction of the policy output promised by the parties, Rabinowitz and Macdonald rely on the midpoint of the issue scale as the voters' anchor point for their pro or contra judgment." (author's abstract

Hypothesis Testing in the Bayesian Framework

While the Bayesian parameter estimation has gained a wider acknowledgement among political scientists, they seem to have less discussed the Bayesian version of hypothesis testing. This paper introduces two Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testing: one based on estimated posterior distributions and the other based on Bayes factors. By using an example based on a linear regression model, I demonstrate similarities and differences not only between the null‐hypothesis significance tests and Bayesian hypothesis tests, but also those among two different Bayesian approaches, which are also critically discussed.publishe