Contributions to the Measurement of Public Opinion in Subpopulations
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Contributions to the Measurement of Public Opinion in Subpopulations Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Sozialwissenschaen vorgelegt von Simon Munzert an der Sektion Politik – Recht – Wirtscha Fachbereich Politik- und Verwaltungswissenscha Tag der mundlichen¨ Prufung:¨ þÉ. Juli óþÕ¢ Õ. Referent: Prof. Dr. Susumu Shikano, Universitat¨ Konstanz ó. Referent: Prof. Dr. Peter Selb, Universitat¨ Konstanz ì. Referent: Prof. Michael D. Ward, PhD, Duke University Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-0-296799 To Stefanie Acknowledgments I would not have been able to write and nish this dissertation without the help and support of many people. First of all, I want to thank my collaborators, Peter Selb and Paul Bauer, for their great work and support. eir contributions to the research presented in this thesis are of no small concern. e single papers received manifold and invaluable feedback over the course of their cre- ation. In particular, Peter Selb and I are grateful to Michael Herrmann, omas Hinz, Winfried Pohlmeier, Susumu Shikano as well as the editors and reviewers of Political Analysis for helpful comments and support. is work was also supported by the Center for Quantitative Methods and Survey Research at the University of Konstanz. e second paper that I wrote together with Paul Bauer also got valuable support. We are grateful to Delia Baldassarri for providing materials of her and Andrew Gelman’s analysis to us. We give the raters of the ALLBUS survey items our most sincere thanks for their contribution. Furthermore, we thank Klaus Armingeon, Matthias Fatke, Markus Freitag, Birte Gundelach, Daniel Stegmuller,¨ Richard Traunmuller¨ and Eva Zeglovits for helpful comments on previ- ous versions of this paper. Additionally, we received extensive feedback from two anonymous reviewers of Political Science Research & Methods. Finally, I owe special thanks to Andreas Diekmann, who pointed me to Edward Ross and his early notes on cohesion and conict in society. With regards to the third paper, I would like to thank Peter Selb, Susumu Shikano and Michael Ward for many helpful comments and suggestions. Further, I thank the participants ii of the Konstanz-Essex PhD colloquium and the doctoral colloquia of the Graduate School for their feedback. I also thank Manfred Gullner¨ for giving me early access to the forsa Bus. I am heavily indebted to Peter Selb for his mentorship over the course of my studies in Konstanz. Finishing this project was a unexpectedly time-consuming endeavor, even more so as I took various detours along the way. I learned a lot while working on these side projects, but this would not have been possible without a permissive supervisor and enthusiastic col- laborator. On that score, I am also grateful to Julian Bernauer, Michael Herrmann, Andreas Murr, Jordan Roberts, omas Schubel,¨ and Susumu Shikano for great cooperation on various projects. Further, I want to thank Michael Ward for hosting me in his lab at Duke University during summer and autumn of óþÕ¦. e time in Durham was very inspirational and gave me the opportunity to put the nishing touches on some of the papers in a superb environment. Writing this thesis was no picnic, but I got tremendous support outside the ivory tower that sweetened it considerably. First of all, I want to thank my family for their everlasting sup- port and love. I thank Johanna and Dirk for many trips to the Alps and a variety of kitchen experiments, and Peter, Dominic and Christian for the distraction of writing a book on web scraping. I am much obliged to Sebastian, Dag and Silvia, who were great companions dur- ing my time in Durham. Also, a big thanks goes out to Espen, Gwen, Jakob, Julian, Kristin, Matthias, Niklas, Paul, Peter, Sabine, omas, and Verena for pastime with good company. And nally, I wish to thank Ste, who motivated and supported me, for all the time and happy moments we spent together over the past ve years. I hope that, at one time or another, I’ll be able to make up for countless hours I spent at the desk and not on a meadow, together. iii Abstract Knowledge about public opinion in subpopulations is of increasing importance in political science research as well as in other disciplines. In this thesis, I present research that develops and extends methods which contribute to a better understanding of public opinion. In partic- ular, the work targets political preferences at the local level, in socio-demographically dened subpopulations and across a wide range of applications. In the rst paper, we suggest a model that helps estimate preferences in constituencies based on survey data and geographic information. is is of particular importance when survey data at the constituency level are sparse and census information to stabilize survey-based estimates using poststratication is not available. e model can be used to inform studies on elite be- havior and voters’ preferences. It can also be used to improve survey-based estimates of any parameter for which the assumption of geographic clustering is justied. In the second paper, we investigate polarization trends in the German public across time, issues, and various subpopulations. We replicate a study of mass polarization in the United States, presented by Baldassarri and Gelman (óþþ) with German data and investigate polar- ization trends on a large set of issues and in various subpopulations. We nd that the German population has depolarized rather than polarized on many issues over the last ìþ years. In the third paper, I develop a framework for constituency-level forecasts of parliamentary elections that allows correcting individual constituency-level forecast models for systematic errors and combining them according to their past performance. I demonstrate the use of the method with an out-of-sample forecast of óÉÉ district races from the óþÕì German federal election. iv Zusammenfassung Wissen uber¨ oentliche¨ Meinung in Subpopulationen ist von zunehmender Bedeutung fur¨ politikwissenschaliche Analysen und Forschung in anderen Disziplinen. In dieser Arbeit stelle ich Forschung vor, die Methoden entwickelt und erweitert, die zu einem besseren Verstand-¨ nis oentlicher¨ Meinung beitragen. Die Arbeit beschaigt¨ sich insbesondere mit politischen Praferenzen¨ auf lokaler Ebene und in auf Basis soziodemograscher Merkmale denierter Subgruppen fur¨ ein breites Spektrum von Anwendungen. Im ersten Papier schlagen wir ein Modell vor, das dabei hil durchschnittliche Praferen-¨ zen in Wahlkreisen auf Basis von Surveydaten und geograscher Information zu schatzen.¨ Dies ist besonders dann relevant, wenn Umfragedaten auf Wahlkreisebene nur sparlich¨ zur Verfugung¨ stehen und Zensusdaten zur Stabilisierung umfragebasierter Schatzungen¨ mittels Poststratikation fehlen. Das Modell kann beispielsweise dazu verwendet werden, um Stu- dien zu Eliteverhalten und Wahlerpr¨ aferenzen¨ zu informieren. Daruber¨ hinaus kann sie dazu dienen, jegliche umfragebasierte Parameterschatzung¨ zu verbessern, fur¨ welche die Annahme der geograschen Klumpung gerechtfertigt ist. Im zweiten Papier untersuchen wir Polarisierungstrends oentlicher¨ Meinung uber¨ Zeit, Is- sues und Subpopulationen hinweg. Wir replizieren eine von Baldassarri und Gelman (óþþ) vorgelegte Studie zu Massenpolarisierung in den USA mit deutschen Daten und untersuchen Trends hinsichtlich einer großen Anzahl substantieller Fragen in verschiedenen Subpopula- tionen. Dabei zeigen wir, dass sich die deutsche Bevolkerung¨ uber¨ die vergangenen ìþ Jahre eher depolarisiert als polarisiert hat. v Im dritten Papier entwickle ich ein Framework zur Vorhersage von Wahlergebnissen bei Parlamentswahlen auf der Wahlkreisebene, das systematische Fehler einzelner Vorhersage- modelle korrigieren und mehrere Modelle gemaߨ ihres Abschneidens bei fruheren¨ Wahlen kombinieren kann. Anhand einer Out-of-sample-Vorhersage von óÉÉ Rennen um das Direkt- mandat bei der Bundestagswahl óþÕì demonstriere ich die Nutzlichkeit¨ der Methode. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract iv Zusammenfassungv Table of Contents vii Õ IntroductionÕ Õ.Õ Estimating constituency-level public opinion.................... ¢ Õ.Õ.Õ Previous approaches in constituency-level preference estimation... ä Õ.Õ.ó Contribution..................................ÕÕ Õ.Õ.ì Outlook..................................... Õó Õ.ó From elites to masses in the study of political polarization............ Õì Õ.ó.Õ Previous research on public opinion polarization............. Õ¦ Õ.ó.ó Contribution.................................. Õä Õ.ó.ì Outlook..................................... Õß Õ.ì e statistical turn in electoral forecasting...................... Õ Õ.ì.Õ State of the art in constituency-level election forecasting ........ ÕÉ Õ.ì.ó Contribution.................................. óì Õ.ì.ì Outlook..................................... ó¦ ó Estimating Constituency Preferences from Sparse Survey Data Using Auxiliary Geographic Information óä vii Table of Contents ó.Õ Introduction....................................... óß ó.ó e current gold standard............................... óÉ ó.ì An alternative approach using auxiliary geographic information ........ ìó ó.ì.Õ Estimation ................................... ì¢ ó.ì.ó Validation.................................... ìä ó.ì.ì An initial check of the model’s central proposition............ ì ó.¦ Survey data........................................ ìÉ ó.¢ Results .......................................... ¦þ ó.ä