Tuesday Seminar – 19 January

Can Part ID be a Proxy? The Measure of Party Ideology with Party Identification

Nadjim Frechet (Université de Montréal)
Maxime Blanchard (McGill University)

Many research questions in electoral studies focus directly or indirectly on political parties’ position on specific issues. Unfortunately, parties do not answer surveys. Accordingly, it is much more complex to determine their position on specific issues compare to voters. We can usually estimate political parties’ ideology with survey data by asking the respondents to position them on the left-right scale. However, pollsters or scholars rarely ask survey respondents to position political parties on other specific issues. We propose a novel approach to estimating party positions. Our method benefits from being data-efficient and straightforward, as it only relies on public opinion surveys conducted among voters. The method we develop focuses on the position of party identifiers on specific issues. Through aggregation, we expect party supporters to be representative of their party on specific issues. To assess the approach’s reliability, we apply it to the British case and compare its results to that of other more data-extensive techniques.

Contact Semih Çakır if you would like to participate in the seminar.

This content has been updated on 18 January 2021 at 11 h 40 min.