Suchergebnisse

This paper demonstrates the relative strengths and weaknesses of SEM and Bayesian approaches to combining different sources of data when estimating latent variables. Data on party left-right positioning collected from party manifestos and surveys of party experts, MPs and voters are used to illustrate the two techniques. Although widely used and accepted, the SEM approach is less useful than the Bayesian approach, particularly when using the latent variable in subsequent predictive estimations. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

The multidimensionality of the Israeli political system is expected given Israel's electoral system and cleavage structure. We introduce a new dataset and measurement of party positions in Israel and provide evidence that Israel's party system is comparable to other multiparty systems in Europe (CHES-EU) and Latin America (CHES-LA). We argue and provide evidence that the most important dimension in the Israeli party system, similar to other multiparty systems, is the general Left-Right continuum, which combines both economic and cultural policy issues. Yet, unlike other established democracies, parties' positions on the Left-Right continuum are closely related to their positions on policies related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. We also discuss Israeli-specific issues which structure the Israeli party competition. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it allows scholars of party competition to include Israel as a comparative case in their research. Second, it is the first study that provides valid and reliable measurement of Israeli parties' positions across multiple issues.

Recent price spikes in the international commodity markets have been blamed for numerous riots, protests and other forms of civil unrest. While these effects are widespread, they are not universal. In this article we investigate the relationship between food prices and social unrest. More specifically, we are concerned with the factors that make civil conflict more or less likely when food prices are elevated. We borrow from the extant literature on civil conflict as well as agriculture economics in order to analyze this phenomenon and help explain the variation among different countries. By merging these two research programs, we hope to make a contribution to each. We utilize a domestic-level measure of food prices rather than the world market price in order to more accurately represent national-level economic conditions. Our results show a positive and significant relationship between food prices and outbreak of social unrest and conflict across a wide range of coutries. Thus, we recommend the inclusion of a food price variable into any future studies of civil conflict. More importantly, we have helped to identify the potential factors that might insulate countries from food-oriented conflict. Given the events of the past year, this issue is paramount for scholars and world leaders alike.

In this article, we show how to apply Bayesian methods to noisy ratio scale distances for both the classical similarities problem as well as the unfolding problem. Bayesian methods produce essentially the same point estimates as the classical methods, but are superior in that they provide more accurate measures of uncertainty in the data. Identification is nontrivial for this class of problems because a configuration of points that reproduces the distances is identified only up to a choice of origin, angles of rotation, and sign flips on the dimensions. We prove that fixing the origin and rotation is sufficient to identify a configuration in the sense that the corresponding maxima/minima are inflection points with full-rank Hessians. However, an unavoidable result is multiple posterior distributions that are mirror images of one another. This poses a problem for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The approach we take is to find the optimal solution using standard optimizers. The configuration of points from the optimizers is then used to isolate a single Bayesian posterior that can then be easily analyzed with standard MCMC methods.

AbstractUsing survey vignettes and scaling techniques, we estimate common socio-cultural and European integration dimensions for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Previous research shows that party placements on the economic left-right dimension are cross-nationally comparable across the EU; however, the socio-cultural dimension is more complex, with different issues forming the core of the dimension in different countries. The 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey included anchoring vignettes which we use as "bridge votes" to place parties from different countries on a common liberal/authoritarian dimension and a separate common scale for European integration. We estimate the dimensions using the Bayesian Aldrich–McKelvey technique. The resulting scales offer cross-nationally comparable, interval-level measures of a party's socio-cultural and EU ideological positions.

To what extent do representational gaps between parties and voters destabilise party systems and create electoral opportunities for anti-establishment parties on the left and right? In this paper, we use multiple measures of party-partisan incongruence to evaluate whether issue-level incongruence contributes to an increase of political disaffection and anti-establishment politics. For this analysis, we use data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) for party positions and public opinion data from the European Election Study (EES). Our findings indicate that multidimensional incongruence is associated with disaffection at the national and European level, and that disaffected mainstream party voters are in turn more likely to consider voting for anti-establishment challenger parties. This finding suggests that perceived gaps in party-citizen substantive representation have important electoral ramifications across European democracies.