Objectifying the Measurement of Voter Ideology with Expert Data

Patrick Mellacher and Gernot Lechner ()
Additional contact information
Gernot Lechner: University of Graz, Austria

No 2024-03, Graz Economics Papers from University of Graz, Department of Economics

Abstract: Many surveys require respondents to place themselves on a left-right ideology scale. However, non-experts may not understand the scale or their "objective" position. Furthermore, a uni-dimensional approach may not suffice to describe ideology coherently. We thus develop a novel way to measure voter ideology: Combining expert and voter survey data, we use classification models to infer how experts would place voters based on their policy stances on three axes: general left-right, economic left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. We validate our approach by finding i) a strong connection between policies and ideology using data-driven approaches, ii) a strong predictive power of our models in cross-validation exercises, and iii) that "objective" ideology as predicted by our models significantly explains the vote choice in simple spatial voting models even after accounting for the subjective ideological distance between voters and parties as perceived by the voters. Our results shed new light on debates around mass polarization.

Keywords: machine learning; random forest; voter ideology; political economy; spatial voting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C38 D70 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cdm, nep-cmp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://unipub.uni-graz.at/obvugrveroeff/download/ ... riginalFilename=true

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:grz:wpaper:2024-03

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://repecgrz.uni-graz.at/RePEc/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Graz Economics Papers from University of Graz, Department of Economics University of Graz, Universitaetsstr. 15/F4, 8010 Graz, Austria. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stefan Borsky ().