[EM] New paper: "~25% intrinsic-honest voters"

[Jameson Quinn]

Kawai and Watanabe 2013 uses what looks to me to be pretty reasonable
statistical methods and assumptions to estimate that voters for the
Japanese House of Representatives (plurality single-member districts) are
between 68% and 83% intrinsically strategic. Crucially, their methods can
estimate the number of intrinsically "strategic" voters who end up voting
honestly because that was the best strategy for them; it turns out that
they estimate that 92-98% of intrinsically "strategic" voters in this sense
actually vote honestly (that is, 95-98% of all voters are voting honestly
in their data).

In order for their model to work, they need to be comparing the results of
similar sub-regions (like precincts; actually, they use small
municipalities) in different electoral districts. They must also assume
that different candidates from the same party are essentially similar.
There must also be sufficient votes for more than 2 parties for their model
to work with. I doubt that they could have gotten a worthwhile estimate if
they'd used US data.

I haven't read the paper carefully enough to be 100% sure, but based on a
quick skim, it appears that they're assuming that the proportion of
strategic voters is constant across ideological groups. That's probably
necessary in order for their parameters to be identifiable/estimable for
the data they have, and close enough to true for their results to be valid.
However, this does mean that their work doesn't give any evidence one way
or the other about how or whether strategic proportion varies across
ideology.

Still, these numbers seem pretty reasonable to me. It's certainly useful to
have an "empirical" number that I can plug into my VSE (aka BR)
simulations. In particular, the most realistic scenarios are in the range
from 75% strategic/25% honest, 50% strategic/50% one-sided strategic.
That's a considerably narrower range than if you have to consider any
combination of strategy, honesty, and one-sidedness. Someday soon I'll
re-run my VSE sims focusing on these numbers and report what I find here.

If anybody wants to read the PDF of this paper but doesn't have access,
email me privately, and I'll send you a copy.
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