Comparing Strategies for Estimating Constituency Opinion from National Survey Samples

Hanretty, Chris; Lauderdale, Benjamin E.; Vivyan, Nick

doi:10.1017/psrm.2015.79

Comparing Strategies for Estimating Constituency Opinion from National Survey Samples

Hanretty, Chris; Lauderdale, Benjamin E.; Vivyan, Nick

Authors

Chris Hanretty

Benjamin E. Lauderdale

Professor Nick Vivyan nick.vivyan@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

Political scientists interested in estimating how public opinion varies by constituency have developed several strategies for supplementing limited constituency survey data with additional sources of information. We present two evaluation studies in the previously unexamined context of British constituency-level opinion: an external validation study of party vote share in the 2010 general election and a cross-validation of opinion toward the European Union. We find that most of the gains over direct estimation come from the inclusion of constituency-level predictors, which are also the easiest source of additional information to incorporate. Individual-level predictors combined with post-stratification particularly improve estimates from unrepresentative samples, and geographic local smoothing can compensate for weak constituency-level predictors. We argue that these findings are likely to be representative of applications of these methods where the number of constituencies is large.

Citation

Hanretty, C., Lauderdale, B. E., & Vivyan, N. (2018). Comparing Strategies for Estimating Constituency Opinion from National Survey Samples. Political Science Research and Methods, 6(3), 571-591. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.79

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Dec 1, 2015
Online Publication Date	Feb 17, 2016
Publication Date	Jul 1, 2018
Deposit Date	Jan 28, 2014
Publicly Available Date	Mar 31, 2016
Journal	Political Science Research and Methods
Print ISSN	2049-8470
Electronic ISSN	2049-8489
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	6
Issue	3
Pages	571-591
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.79

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Advance online version This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.