The chapter presents a Bayesian model for estimating ideological ambiguity of political parties from survey data. In the model, policy positions are defined as probability distributions over a policy space and survey-based party placements are treated as random draws from those distributions. A cross-classified random-effects model is employed to estimate ideological ambiguity, defined as the dispersion of the latent probability distribution. Furthermore, non-response patterns are incorporated as an additional source of information on ideological ambiguity. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is provided for parameter estimation. The usefulness of the model is demonstrated using cross-national expert survey data on party platforms.
CITATION STYLE
Rozenas, A. (2013). Inferring ideological ambiguity from survey data. In Advances in Political Economy: Institutions, Modelling and Empirical Analysis (Vol. 9783642352393, pp. 369–382). Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35239-3_18
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