May 22, 2014 | ANES, Elections, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown and Ioannis Andreadis.
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are web platforms that help voters determine the candidate or the political party that best matches their own political ideology. Visitors answer a series of questions to gauge their political positions. The VAA platform then estimates the similarity or dissimilarity of these positions to those of candidates or parties.
There are various ways to present these estimates. One option is to display a list of the candidates or parties along with a number indicating the similarity or dissimilarity of each. Another option is a graph like the one below from Greece, where issues from the election are represented on each axis, and users can visualize their ideological position relative to that of the parties.
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Example of diagram from the Greek VAA www.votematch.gr from the elections for the European Parliament. Left/Right is represented by the horizontal axis and Pro-Europeanism/Euroscepticism is represented by the vertical axis. The political party logos indicate their ideological position and the center of the concentric circles indicates the position of the user.
Another example of VAAs in action is Vote Match Europe, an international network of VAAs for the 2014 European Parliament elections across fourteen EU countries. The Vote Match Europe website allows users to see the parties closest to them across all of the countries in the network, and to learn more about the parties and their policies. A goal of the Vote Match Europe website is to promote European citizenship and better inform citizens about the elections for the European Parliament at large.
Ioannis Andreadis is Assistant Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Department of Political Sciences at Aristotle University Thessaloniki. This semester, he is a scholar in residence at the Center for Political Studies (CPS), seeking to learn more about the American National Elections Studies (ANES) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) under a grant from the Fulbright Program.
In his capacity as a researcher, Andreadis has studied and written about VAAs, and he also both designs and studies VAAs. In particular, he created and oversees the Voting Advice Application HelpMeVote. HelpMeVote was used by more than 480,000 voters during the May 2012 Greek Parliamentary Elections. The application was also used in Iceland and Albania, and is currently being used for the 2014 European Parliament election.
In a recent paper, Andreadis tackles the question of utility of VAAs. He suggest that VAAs must be built to high academic standards, and realize the following benefits:
- VAAs help voters should become more knowledgeable about party positions, allowing the voters to make better choices.
- VAAs help political parties not covered in traditional media to connect with voters who agree with their values.
- VAAs generate data that researchers can use to better understand voting behavior.
VAAs are growing in popularity in places with multi-party systems and high Internet availability – for example, in Western Europe.
In electoral systems with only two parties, VAAs may be less useful given the limited choice set. If a VAA had been used for the 2009 Greek elections or earlier – when two major Greek political parties dominated national politics – it probably would not have been as popularly used. But in the 2012 elections, the Greek parliament featured seven parties, making way for a new VAA market.
With this in mind, adaptation to America’s two party system poses challenges. VAAs could be used in American primaries, where many candidates from the same party compete against each other, but only if candidates running in the same primary have very different positions on enough issues.
May 13, 2014 | Elections, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Brian Min.
With six weeks of phased voting, 80% of potential voters are expected to cast ballots in India, making it the world’s largest election. Already marked by political posturing and violence, the elections also include the politics of light.
CPS researcher Brian Min developed an innovative way to track energy emissions. Min tracks images from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS). In orbit since 1970, these satellites record high resolution images of light on Earth every night. Min uses these images to track energy consumption over time.
In a recent paper, Min applied this methodology to elections in India. Some of the country remains isolated from a consistent supply of electricity. Using data from 1992 to 2010, Min finds that otherwise dark villages are often illuminated during election cycles. When elections come around, politicians promise light and often deliver power leading up to votes. These areas are then returned to darkness as election promises literally fade from the spotlight.
It remains to be seen if the 2014 election will change power grids. Min will be ready to measure using the satellite images. Look out for future posts about Min’s state-of-the-art research based on the same satellite imaging in other areas.
Apr 9, 2014 | Current Events, Elections, Innovative Methodology, National
Post developed by Katie Brown and Timothy Ryan.
There are political issues and then there are moral political issues. Often cited examples of the latter include abortion and same sex marriage. But what makes a political issue moral?
Timothy Ryan, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Political Science and affiliate of the Center for Political Studies (CPS), explored this question in a recent article in The Journal of Politics. An extensive literature already asserts a moral vs. not moral issue distinction. Yet, there is no consensus in how to distinguish between moral and non-moral political issues. Further, trying to sort issues into these categories proves challenging. Many people assume that same-sex marriage is a moral issue, but does everyone see the issue in moral terms? Do people vary in terms of whether they see economic issues, such as Social Security reform and collective bargaining, with morality at stake?
In an attempt to define the divide between moral and non-moral, Ryan turned to the psychology literature. In particular, Ryan applies moral conviction to morality in politics. Moral conviction refers to topics that tap into an individual’s sense of right and wrong. According to the psychology literature, moral conviction leads to a different type of information processing. Moral conviction involves negative emotions, hostile opinions, and potential punitive actions.
Ryan then tests this concept as it relates to political issues with two studies. In both studies, he measures the emotions stimulated by moral conviction. He finds that moral conviction evokes negative emotions toward political disagreement. He also finds that both traditionally moral issues (like abortion or same sex marriage) and traditionally non-moral issues (like labor relations or Social Security) can both illicit moral conviction.
The graph below displays the mean (the squares), the middle 50% (the bars), and the middle 80% (the dots) of moral conviction for five different political issues. As we can see, moral conviction varies a lot for both economic and non-economic issues. Of course many people see same-sex marriage as a matter of right and wrong, Yet, many also see Social Security reform in the same way. The upshot is that, when it comes to deciding which issues are moral, an important part of the answer depends on the individual.
Distribution of Moral Conviction Variable
Ryan’s article also challenges a common assumption: the assumption that moral fervor in politics comes more from the right than the left. In the article, he examines propensity to moralize several political issues. The result? Liberals and conservatives moralize in equal measure. The figure below illustrates this with three separate samples: students, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk respondents, and Evaluations of Government and Society Study (EGSS) respondents.
Moral Conviction by Partisanship
Taken together, Ryan’s findings suggest that the response of moral conviction may be more important than distinguishing between inherently moral and non-moral political issues. Rather, all issues can produce a moral conviction response, depending on the person. Ryan concludes that, “in terms of the underlying psychology, Social Security is just as moralized for some people as Abortion is. Morality is in the eye of the beholder.”
In the fall, Ryan will continue his research on morality in politics when he joins the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Assistant Professor of Political Science.
Mar 24, 2014 | ANES, ANES 65th Anniversary, Elections, Innovative Methodology, National
This is a guest post written by W. Phillips Shively, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.
This post is part of a series celebrating the 65th anniversary of the American National Election Studies (ANES). The posts will seek to highlight some of the many ways in which the ANES has benefited scholarship, the public, and the advancement of science. Do you have ideas for additional posts? Please contact us by email ([email protected]) or Twitter (@umisrcps).
First and foremost, I can’t really separate ANES, especially in its earliest and most exciting time, from Philip Converse, Donald Stokes, and Warren Miller. Though the large, ongoing dataset is seen as their legacy, it was actually a byproduct of their greatest contribution (after all, there were other large surveys being done at the time, but only theirs became institutionalized like ANES). Their real contribution was research that was breathtakingly creative and rigorous for its time. In the 1960s, when I was in graduate school, they were my gods; if he had ever had a poster, Phil Converse would have been on my dormitory room wall. They pioneered considering the interaction of data from different levels of social organization, analyzing the interplay of historical change and individual behaviors, and applying data analysis to democratic theory. The ANES data set came to be of such importance in the field because they demonstrated the beautiful things that could be done with it.
Converse, Miller, and Campbell developing ANES predecessor the Michigan Election Studies
The high point of my graduate studies was a secondary analysis of the 1956 and 1960 national election studies, to test for various processes by which individuals were influenced in their voting by their community (i.e., an early and very primitive study of contextual effects.) This was pre-computer, so I did it all with IBM cards and a card sorter. It was the most exciting thing I did in graduate school, yet all I was doing was imitating Miller, Converse, and Stokes.
In more recent years, ANES made a huge contribution when Steven Rosenstone took the lead in setting up the ambitious Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), a cooperative study involving roughly fifty national election studies. He was able to build on years of cooperation between the ANES and international scholars, started especially by Stokes and Converse.
While the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) now serves a broad inter-disciplinary audience, it was initially a spin-off of the ANES. I attended the summer program in its second year, 1965. It consisted of a single class, co-taught by Stokes and Converse. Each day they opened some exciting new window for us. One day, Stokes introduced us to the problem of cross-level inference, which he had just started work on; I had never heard of it before, and it would become an important part of my work over the next fifty years. Another day they invited a young sociology graduate student, Gudmund Iversen, to come in and talk to us about an interesting new kind of statistics he had just learned of – Bayesian statistics.
Mar 20, 2014 | Current Events, Elections, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Kirill Kalinin.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
An earlier post on the Center for Political Studies (CPS) Blog covered Kirill Kalinin’s work concerning election fraud in Russia. That post showed evidence from empirical work that polls ahead of the 2012 Russian presidential election were flawed, setting the stage for subsequent election fraud. This post returns to Kalinin’s work to consider why.
Political Science Ph.D. candidate Kirill Kalinin studies election fraud. Along with Professor of Political Science, Professor of Statistics, and Center for Political Studies Faculty Associate Walter Mebane, Kalinin authored a paper – Understanding Electoral Frauds through Evolution of Russian Federalism: from “Bargaining Loyalty” to “Signaling Loyalty” – arguing that Russia’s election fraud can be understood as rooted in federalism and a formal signaling game model.
Kalinin and Mebane support this argument with empirical analysis. The researchers find that the occurrence of 0s and 5s in the last digit of election turnout percentages to be suspicious. In fact, using statistical modeling, they find it to be linked to election fraud connected with post-election rewards and punishments. From 2000 on, fraud appears to be widespread.
But why? In 2000, Putin came to power and initiated a process of recentralization. From the mid 1990s through the 2000s, regional governors made changes based in rational strategy to Russia’s federal relations.
In the mid-1990s, the central government rewarded governors with political, institutional, and financial resources in exchange for favorable election results. In the 2000s, this escalated to election fraud.
As Kalinin concludes, “Over the most recent election cycles Russian elections have become increasingly unfree and unfair, characterized by suppression of electoral competition, rising levels of administrative interference and drastic growth of electoral frauds.” That is, the rewards for fraud have rendered Russian elections inherently fraudulent.
Mar 13, 2014 | ANES, ANES 65th Anniversary, Elections
Post developed by Katie Brown and Morris P. Fiorina.
This post is the first in a series celebrating the 65th anniversary of the American National Election Studies (ANES). The posts will seek to highlight some of the many ways in which the ANES has benefited scholarship, the public, and the advancement of science. Do you have ideas for additional posts? Please contact us by email ([email protected]) or Twitter (@umisrcps).
Ahead of the 2012 Presidential election, Morris P. Fiorina, who is the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times.
In the article, Fiorina used American National Election Studies (ANES) data to consider the role of the personal qualities of candidates in election outcomes. Fiorina referenced a research report published in the British Journal of Political Science (with Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope) after the 2000 presidential election in the United States. The report sought to explain Al Gore’s defeat in the election during a time of peace and prosperity. The report utilized a battery of questions from the ANES that asks respondents to detail what would make them vote for or against each candidate. The authors coded the respondents’ responses to measure candidates’ personal qualities.
What was the relationship between this rating of candidates’ personal qualities and election outcomes? Looking at thirteen elections from 1952 to 2000, Fiorina and his colleagues found that in four elections the electorate gave a noticeable edge to one of the candidates, but the outcomes were not what pundits would have expected. For example, the highest rated Democratic candidate was Jimmy Carter, who lost to the lowest rated Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, in 1980. And the lowest rated Democratic candidate was Bill Clinton, who won a landslide re-election in 1996.
In the op-ed, based on these findings, Fiorina challenged those citing Romney’s likability deficit relative to Obama as an unlikely cause of the election outcome. As Fiorina wrote, “If Romney loses, it will be because the public believes that Obama has done a good enough job to continue or that Romney has not advanced a credible recovery program. ‘Voters didn’t like my personality’ is a loser’s excuse.”
In subsequent media interviews, Fiorina emphasized how the ANES, funded by the American National Science Foundation (NSF), is far more than another database; it is a 60 year political history of electoral politics in the US. As Fiorina commented, “ANES provides an accurate history of modern American politics, as seen through the eyes of voters at the time, not filtered through the lenses of academic historians or biased journalists.”
