Integrating Large-Scale Online Surveys and Aggregate Data at the Constituency Level: The Estimation of Voter Transitions in the 2015 British General Elections

Thurner, Paul W.; Mauerer, Ingrid; Bort, Maxim; Klima, André und Küchenhoff, Helmut (2020): Integrating Large-Scale Online Surveys and Aggregate Data at the Constituency Level: The Estimation of Voter Transitions in the 2015 British General Elections. In: Survey Research Methods, Bd. 14, Nr. 5: S. 461-476

Abstract

What have been the underlying voter shifts that led to the victory of the Con-servative Party in the 2015 British general election – against all predictions bypollsters? Analyses of voter transitions based on (online) surveys and recall ques-tions are plagued by sampling and response biases, whereas aggregate data analysesare suspect of the well-known ecological fallacy. We propose a systematic statisticalcombination of individual and aggregate data at the constituency level to identifyregional electoral shifts between the 2010 to 2015 British general elections, with aparticular focus on England. Large-scale individual data collected by the BritishElection Study Internet Panel (BESIP) allow us to locate more than 28,000 respon-dents in their constituencies. We estimate transitions based on a recently developedBayesian Hierarchical Hybrid Multinomial Dirichlet (HHMD) model. We discovera clear deviance from pure RxC ecological inference and from pure online panel-based estimations of transition matrices. Convergence diagnostics corroborate thesuperiority of the hybrid models.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Keywords: voter transitions; ecological inference; British election study internet panel; hybrid models
• Fakultät: Sozialwissenschaften > Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft ; Mathematik, Informatik und Statistik > Statistik > Lehrstühle/Arbeitsgruppen > Statistisches Beratungslabor
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 320 Politik
• ISSN: 1864-3361
• Sprache: Englisch