Application of Non-additive Measures and Integrals for Analysis of the Importance of Party Positions for Voting

Abstract

The paper shows the possibility of applying the tool of non-additive measures and the belief functions theory to solving a number of problems of significance analysis and conflict of the political party positions. The study was performed on a database of online polls of parties in Germany before the elections to the Bundestag in 2013 and the results of these elections. The possibility of finding the most significant groups of issues for voting, evaluating the political heterogeneity of society, assessing the importance of the positions of individual parties for voting, assessing the conflict of the party positions on important issues is shown.

Clustering a body of evidence based on conflict measures

“…We present these results using belief functions that help us to model the importance of groups of questions. The methodology of such evaluation is described in [10], and based on the assumption that the number of expected true answers is proportional to the number of voices given to the parties. Thus, our belief function is constructed on the set of questions X = {x 1 , ..., x 8 }, and by the computations we can see that the body of evidence consists of 255 focal elements and the mass function on them is small but its values vary from one focal element to another.…”