A Reply to Whiteley

Stan Taylor

British Journal of Political Science, 1980, vol. 10, issue 2, 268-270

Abstract: In a disingenuous piece of aggregate data analysis Paul Whiteley suggests that, because he found that the correlation between two variables in a local election held at one point of time in one city was spurious when a third was controlled for, this implies that the relationships between two variables, one calculated on a different basis, in two general elections which took place three years earlier and covered a wide area of England, will also be spurious when an additional variable is introduced into the analysis. It is an inelegant analysis in model building and testing, in so far as it cannot explain the findings it purports to explain. Unfortunately it is also a textbook case of making causal inferences from variables associated with each other for reasons that lie outside the scope of the model.

Date: 1980
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