Evaluating and Improving Item Response Theory Models for Cross-National Expert Surveys

Pemstein, Daniel; Tzelgov, Eitan; Wang, Yiting

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2613421

“…Extensive Monte Carlo simulations provide strong evidence that bridge coders indeed improve model fit and greatly increase the degree of cross-national comparability (Pemstein et al 2015).…”

Section: Creating the V-dem Core Civil Society Indexmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…In the process over 2,500 country experts worldwide have contributed ratings to V-Dem (Coppedge et al 2015b(Coppedge et al , 2015c. The country-expert data is combined into country-year estimates using a stateof-the-art Bayesian ordinal item-response theory model developed by the project's methodologists (Pemstein et al 2015). The V-Dem civil society battery has ten questions that gauge different disaggregated aspects of civil society.…”

Section: The V-dem Core Civil Society Indexmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Varieties of Democracy Core Civil Society Index

Bernhard

¹

,

Tzelgov

²

,

Jung

³

et al. 2015

Self Cite

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: AbstractThis paper introduces the Core Civil Society Index (CCSI), a measure of the robustness of civil society, using indicators from the Varieties of Democracy battery on civil society. It begins with a discussion of the reemergence of civil society as a central concept in comparative politics and discusses the existing state of data to capture it. It then discusses the conceptualization behind the CCSI and the construction of the measure. This is followed by a series of face and discriminant validity checks. The paper closes with an example of the CCSI's utility by examining the question of whether postcommunist civil society is "weak" compared to other regions. We find no evidence that postcommunist civil society is less robust than civil society in other major world regions via time-series cross-sectional analysis using 2999 country-year observations between 1989 and 2012.3

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“…To explore the temporal relationship between various aspects of democracy utilizing the proposed sequence analysis approach, we use the V-Dem dataset v4 for the purposes of IRT-model for aggregating and weighting expert ratings and for calculating confidence intervals alongside a series of validity and reliability tests, including tests of intercoder reliability (see Pemstein et al 2015 andCoppedge et al 2015c). This model takes into account the possibilities that experts may make mistakes and have different scales in mind when providing judgments.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating Sequences in Ordinal Data: A New Approach With Adapted Evolutionary Models

Lindenfors¹,

Jansson²,

Wang³

et al. 2018

PSRM

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to:

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“…Therefore we use Bayesian item response theory (IRT) modeling techniques to estimate latent country coding unit characteristics from our collection of expert ratings (see Pemstein, Tzelgov and Wang 2015). The underpinnings of these measurement models are straightforward: they use patterns of cross-rater (dis)agreement to estimate variations in reliability and systematic bias across disparate measures of the same, or similar, concepts (i.e., multiple expert ratings).…”

Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These are coders who code the full time series (generally 1900-2012) for more than one country covering one or more areas ("surveys"). Essentially, this coding procedure allows us to mitigate the incomparability of coders' thresholds and the problem of cross-national estimates' calibration (Pemstein et al 2015).…”

Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Structure of the Executive in Authoritarian and Democratic Regimes: Regime Dimensions Across the Globe, 1900-2014

Teorell

¹

,

Lindberg

²

2015

SSRN Journal

6

0

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: countries across the globe from 1900 to today. A plausibility probe gauges the extent to which the five dimensions can predict the level of repression, rent-seeking and spending on public goods across space and time, controlling for the degree of democracy. We conclude by suggesting several avenues for future research that can be pursued with these data.4

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Evaluating and Improving Item Response Theory Models for Cross-National Expert Surveys

Cited by 56 publications

References 25 publications

The Varieties of Democracy Core Civil Society Index

The Varieties of Democracy Core Civil Society Index

Investigating Sequences in Ordinal Data: A New Approach With Adapted Evolutionary Models

The Structure of the Executive in Authoritarian and Democratic Regimes: Regime Dimensions Across the Globe, 1900-2014

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