Estimation of electoral volatility parameters employing ecological inference methods

Pablo Sandoval () and Silvia Ojeda ()
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Pablo Sandoval: Universidad Santo Tomás
Silvia Ojeda: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2023, vol. 57, issue 1, No 20, 405-426

Abstract: Abstract The general purpose of this work consists in to relate the statistical methods for the estimation of voter transitions rates based on aggregate data, with the problem of inferring the composition of the electorate in a democratic system in seven categories of voters once the second of two consecutive voting processes has been carried out. To know the electorate composition between stable and unstable voters is a matter of relevance to sociology and political science regarding comparative research. Available options to infer these values—electoral polls and panel surveys—present reliability issues arising from lack of recall or concealing on the voting behavior. In view of this situation, we propose an original estimation strategy consisting in to locate the unknown quantities within of a matrix whose sums of entries by rows and columns are known; based on this, such magnitudes can be estimated resorting to Ecological inference methods. The proposal was applied to the case of competition between political conglomerates in Chile for the period 1993–2009, using two types of estimation methods with aggregate data available in the free software R. One of those methods rendered results consistent with previous evidence proceeding from polls. We conclude that the proposed strategy can be replicable on a larger-scale application, even though these methods must, in parallel, remain subject to evaluation and improvement.

Keywords: Ecological inference; Electoral volatility; Electorate composition; Parametric inference; Pedersen index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/s11135-022-01367-z

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