Stata Software for Assessing Survey Bias

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BinaryApe / Foter / CC BYIn a recent paper, we derive various multinomial measures of bias in public opinion surveys (e.g. pre-election polls). Put differently, with our methodology, you may calculate a scalar measure of survey bias in multi-party elections. Thanks to Kit Baum over at Boston College, our Stata add-on surveybias.ado is now available…

A Scalar Measure for Bias in (Multi-Party Pre-Election) Surveys

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All surveys deviate from the true distributions of the variables, but some more so than others. This is particularly relevant in the context of election studies, where the true distribution of the vote is revealed on election night. Jocelyn Evans and I present a method for calculating a scalar measure that neatly summarises such bias for multi-party elections. We also present a Stata module that implements our new method.

Local Heroes? Der Effekt räumlicher Distanz zwischen Wählern und Kandidaten bei der Unterhauswahl in England 2010″ (Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences)

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Slides (in German) for my recent talk about our geolocation and voting project at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences. The presentation is based on [bibtex file=ka.bib key=arzheimer-evans-2012]. The full PDF for the presentation is here.

nlcom and the Delta Method

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The delta method approximates the expectation of some function of a random variable by relying on a (truncated) Taylor series expansion. In plain words, that means that one can use the delta method to calculate confidence intervals and perform hypothesis tests on just about every linear or nonlinear transformation of a vector of parameter estimates. Stata’s procedure nlcom is a particularly versatile and powerful implementation of the delta method. If you can write down the formula of the transformation, nlcom will spit out the result. And that means that you can abuse Stata’s built in procedures to implement your own estimators.

New Publication: The Left, East vs West, and the 2009 Election

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VS/Springer has just published the a massive volume on the 2009 Bundestag election. Our chapter looks (once more) into the differences between voters in the former Federal Republic and their eastern compatriots in the 2009 election. While these differences persist, we find that people in the West are also deviating from traditional patterns of voting behaviour. (In German)