Empirical foundation of valence using Aldrich–McKelvey scaling

Fabian Gouret

Review of Economic Design, 2021, vol. 25, issue 3, No 4, 177-226

Abstract: Abstract This paper uses data from the 2004 pre-election survey of the American National Election Study to test empirically different ways of incorporating a valence parameter into a Downsian utility function. We call particular attention to the problem of interpersonal incomparability of responses to the liberal-conservative scale, and use Aldrich–McKelvey’s pathbreaking method to obtain accurate distances between respondents and candidates, the key regressors. We find that the utility function the most supported by the empirical evidence, the intensity valence utility function, is the one which permits to make the better predictions for the 2004 presidential election. We also consider counterfactual analyses wherein we test if Bush, the candidate with the highest intensity valence, has dominant strategies which would have insured him to obtain a majority of the popular vote. According to the theory, it is known that the candidate with the highest intensity valence does not have such dominant strategies if the distribution of voters in the policy space is too heterogenous. Nevertheless, we show that the distribution of voters in 2004 is sufficiently homogenous for Bush to have dominant strategies.

Keywords: Spatial models of voting; Valence; Survey; Aldrich–McKelvey scaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10058-021-00243-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Empirical foundation of valence using Aldrich-McKelvey scaling (2021)
Working Paper: Empirical foundation of valence using Aldrich-McKelvey scaling (2019)
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:spr:reecde:v:25:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s10058-021-00243-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10058

DOI: 10.1007/s10058-021-00243-w

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Design is currently edited by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Fuhito Kojima and Tilman Börgers

More articles in Review of Economic Design from Springer, Society for Economic Design
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().