How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in The States?

Lax, Jeffrey R.; Phillips, Justin

doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2008.00360.x

Cited by 411 publications

(366 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Post-stratification is a standard statistical adjustment for nonresponse bias in sample surveys. The combination of the two improves estimates of small-area opinion (e.g., Gelman and Little, 1997;Lax and Phillips, 2009;Warshaw and Rodden, 2012). However, I do not exactly follow MRP because I do not have Census targets for turnout in primary elections.…”

Section: A2 Connection To Multi-level Regression With Post-stratificmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates

Hill

2015

QJPS

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Many hypothesize that the divergence between Democratic and Republican members of Congress is partly attributable to partisan primary elections. Yet most empirical evidence on the influence of primary elections finds small to no effect on member behavior. I argue that existing designs that compare members elected out of nomination systems with more open rules of access to members elected out of more closed systems rest on the crucial and untested assumption that more closed institutions lead to more polarized primary electorates. With survey opinions, turnout validated to voter files, and an IRT model of ideology, I characterize the preferences of Democratic and Republican primary electorates and general electorates in each House district in 2010 and 2012. To the extent that there is a relationship between primary ideology and closed primary institution, it is in the direction opposite that hypothesized. I then show that the primary electorate diverges from the general electorate in every House district and even from supporters of the party in the general election in almost every district, which is consistent with a centrifugal influence of primary voters. These results suggest that institution of nomination may not have a large influence on the type of voters who turn out, and that some other feature of nominating contests must be implicated in polarized primary voters. * I have benefited from comments by seminar participants at Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Washington University, Andy Hall, Greg Huber, Gary Jacobson, Thad Kousser, Jeff Lewis, Sam Popkin, Chris Tausanovitch, Lynn Vavreck, the editors, and anonymous reviewers.† Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0521, La Jolla, CA 92093-0521; sjhill@ucsd.edu, http://www.sethjhill.com. 1Although primary elections were introduced by reformers around the turn of the twentieth century to democratize American politics, most worry today that primaries are part of a disconnect between what representatives do in Congress and what most citizens would prefer (e.g., Fiorina and Abrams, 2009). Democrats in Congress seem to be more liberal than their districts, Republicans seem to be more conservative than theirs, and compromise is less common than voters desire. The theory connecting primary elections to representative divergence from the general electorate is straightforward. Candidates for office need to win the votes of those who turn out in the elections for which they stand. If a candidate need only win a general election to gain a seat in Congress, the candidate needs to please those citizens who vote in the general election. If the candidate has to first win a partisan primary prior to winning a general election, however, the candidate must please two different voting electorates. Thus, the candidate may have to appeal to the divergent preferences of the primary electorate to the detriment of the general electorate when the primary electorate is filled with citizens of more partisan or extreme preferenc...

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Section: A2 Connection To Multi-level Regression With Post-stratificmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gelman and Little, 1997;Lax and Phillips, 2009;Warshaw and Rodden, 2012). These methods, called multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP), use post-stratification along with the hierarchical model to improve estimation.…”

Section: A2 Connection To Multi-level Regression With Post-stratificmentioning

confidence: 99%

Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates

Hill

2015

QJPS

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“…MRP is a technique presented by Gelman and Little (1997), validated by Park, Gelman, and Bafumi (2006) and Lax and Phillips (2009a), and extended in Berkman and Plutzer (2005), Lax and Phillips (2009b), and Kastellec, Lax, and Phillips (2010), inter alia. It has been shown to produce highly accurate estimates even with a single national poll and simple demographic-geographic models (simpler than we use herein).…”

Section: Responsiveness Vs Congruencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Democratic Deficit in the States

Lax

Phillips

2011

American J Political Sci

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394

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One might worry, however, that this test is too lenient. The ideology-policy correlation is the dominant approach in studies of state responsiveness, and it has been the most fruitful approach to date. However, problems of inference arise because researchers cannot know exactly how diffuse preference measures ought to translate into policy. That is, policy and ideology lack a common metric (Erikson, Wright, and McIver 1993, 93;Matsusaka 2001 but without knowing the mapping of ideology to voter policy preferences, we cannot tell if policy is over-or underresponsive to preferences.Most existing work, by focusing on the ideologypolicy correlation, also does not assess how responsive states are to voter preferences on specific policies. Nor does it tell us how effective state political systems are at translating opinion majorities into public policy. If a majority of voters in a state wants to adopt a lottery or impose an abortion restriction, how likely is the state to do so? In other words, is policy usually congruent with majority will?Both responsiveness and congruence are forms of policy representation, but they capture different dimensions of democratic performance. To be clear, by responsiveness, we mean a positive correlation between opinion and policy; by congruence, we mean that policy actually matches majority opinion. Where majority will is truly sovereign, you would expect both strong responsiveness and a high level of congruence. Policy adoption may increase with higher public support (suggesting responsiveness), but policy may still often be inconsistent with majority opinion (suggesting a lack of congruence),

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“…Together, this multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach enables opinion estimation in different political geographies. Public opinion scholars have extensively elaborated and validated this methodology [23][24][25][26].…”

Section: Model Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Distribution of Climate Change Public Opinion in Canada

et al. 2016

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While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change's causes varies geographically, with more people attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels.

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How Should We Estimate Public Opinion in The States?

Cited by 411 publications

References 20 publications

Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates

Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates

The Democratic Deficit in the States

The Distribution of Climate Change Public Opinion in Canada

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