Measuring and comparing party ideology and heterogeneity

Abstract

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but lack the ability to provide insight into intraparty politics. In this paper, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data which enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll call voting and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to determine the sources of party heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules reduce party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, the presence of these electoral rules conditions the effect of district magnitude.

Finding the bird’s wings: Dimensions of factional conflict on Twitter

“…One way to do so is the use of elite surveys. Carroll and Kubo (2019) present an internationally comparable measurement of intra-party heterogeneity while Steiner and Mader (2019) show the effect of this heterogeneity on issue salience. Jankowski et al (2019) demonstrate the validity of these methods to measure changes over time.…”

Breakups hurt: Party switching and perceived proximity between politicians and their party

“…In addition, we run the analysis considering only a sub-sample of parties for which we have data related to repeated elections, in order to track them over time taking into account the evolution of intra-party heterogeneity (Carroll and Kubo, 2019) after the out-switching; in these additional models, we also keep constant the lagged average level of internal disunity, that is, the average perceived distance between respondents and their party. By doing that, we evaluate the effect of defections net of the ex-ante level of intra-party heterogeneity, which could have produced the switches: this partially attenuates the concerns about the out-switching of distant MPs as the only cause of the lower self-perceived distances.…”

“…Scholars started to investigate internal divisions from many different perspectives, analysing splits in parliamentary roll call votes (Kam, 2009), party switching and parliamentary defections (Heller and Mershon, 2009a), party fissions (Ibenskas, 2019), and disagreement expressed at party conferences (Ceron and Greene, 2019; Greene and Haber, 2015) or in parliamentary speeches (Bäck et al, 2016). Recent studies used political elite surveys as additional sources of data on intra-party disagreement (Carroll and Kubo, 2019; Close et al, 2019; Schumacher and Elmelund-Præstekær, 2018; Steiner and Mader, 2019).…”

The logic of delegation and institutional contexts: Ministerial selection under mixed-member systems in Japan

“…However, in the context of Japanese legislative politics, a roll-call vote analysis is meaningless, because of the extremely high level of voting unity in the Japanese Diet. An alternative solution is to apply a scaling technique to elite survey data (Carroll and Kubo, 2017; Poole, 1998; Saiegh, 2009). Since we can assume that survey responses are not endogenous to legislative organization and party discipline, we can estimate meaningful scores for individual political positions from elite survey data.…”