21 June 2014
In a recent article published in AJPS it is claimed that Bayesian
estimators have a superior performance in the estimation of the
influence of group-level covariates, especially if the number of
groups/clusters is small. In the paper presented at
EPSA, we show that the problems addressed by
Bayesian techniques can also be adequately addressed by a frequentist
technique, restricted maximum likelihood, without the problems
involved in Bayesian estimation, such as the computational cost and the
need to select an appropriate prior.
Read more ...
06 April 2014
A paper entitled Separating Tactical from Sincere Voting: A
Finite-Mixture Discrete-Choice Modelling
Approach was
presented at the Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science
Association 2014 in Chicago, Ill. It presents a novel approach to
uncover tactical voting from responses in electoral survey studies. The
basic idea is that the distribution of observed voting decisions is a
finite mixture of non-tactical (aka sincere) and tactical voting
decisions, where tactical voting decisions are characterised by choosing
- in stead of the full choice set - from a restricted consideration set.
This restricted consideration set then contains only those alternatives
(e.g. parties’ candidates) that are considered viable by the voter in
her respective constituency or voting district.
Read more ...
08 September 2013
A paper entitled Information Flows, Expectation Formation, and Tactical
Voting was presented at the ECPR
General Conference 2013 at the Université de Bordeaux. It examines how
results in the previous election (at constituency level) and parties’
current popularity (as expressed in their performance in opinion polls)
influence the formation of expectations about parties’ chances at the
constituency level and at the national level and how these expectations
affect the intention to vote tactically.
Read more ...
08 April 2013
A paper entitled “On the Distinctiveness of Party
Families” was presented at the
2014 General Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association. In
this paper I describe the average positions (and the development of
these) of the party families commonly known in the comparative study of
European parties. In this paper I distinguish between three major
political dimensions:
Economic Left-Right
Traditionalist vs. Permissive
Read more ...
27 January 2013
A paper on “A Dynamic State-Space Model of Coded Political Texts” has
been published as advance
access article in Political Analysis. Accompanying this article, there
is a data set with positions of parties in the economic and social
policy spaces, reconstructed from Comparative Manifestos Project data
using the method in the article. The data set is available from the
Political Analysis dataverse. I
will make a more extensive data set, suitable for multiple imputations
and the like, available on my website in the near future. Here is a
picture that shows what this method can do:
Read more ...
03 April 2012
An article about “Bounded volatility in the Dutch electoral battlefield:
A panel study on the structure of changing vote intentions in the
Netherlands during 2006–2010” is now available for advance access from
the journal Acta Politica.
Read more ...
