Vote Choices and Valence: Intercepts and Alternate Specifications

Mauerer, Ingrid und Tutz, Gerhard (2024): Vote Choices and Valence: Intercepts and Alternate Specifications. In: Political Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 3: pp. 361-378

Abstract

Valence is a crucial concept in studying spatial voting and party competition. The widely adopted approach is to rely on intercepts of vote choice models and to infer, based on their size and direction, how valence affects party strategies in empirical settings. The approach suffers from fundamental statistical flaws. This contribution provides the statistical fundamentals to advance the empirical modeling of valence. It proposes an appropriate modeling approach to interpret intercepts as valences and alternate specifications to parameterize the effects of valence.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Keywords: valence; choice model; intercepts; coding; chooser attributes; choice attributes
• Faculties: Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Statistics; Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Statistics > Chairs/Working Groups > Seminar for Applied Stochastic
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology; 300 Social sciences > 310 Statistics; 300 Social sciences > 320 Political science
• JEL Classification: B4, C1, C4, C6, C8
• ISSN: 1047-1987 ; 1476-4989
• Language: English