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

[Jameson Quinn]

Hmm.... Spenkuch 2013, looking at Germany instead of Japan, seems to find
that intrinsic honesty is 65%, not 25%. I'll try to figure out if this is a
difference in data or methodology.


2014-08-10 11:33 GMT-04:00 Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>:

> 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.
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20140810/6d2cedc4/attachment.htm>