Abstract
There are two main approaches to estimating the proportion of the electorate who are floating voters: the survey method and the ecological estimate method. Both the methods have their advantages and their problems. The main difficulties with the survey method are the coverage of the sample and the problems introduced by reliance on the quality of memory of the subjects. Ecological estimates have different problems, the principal of which is known as the ecological fallacy. The aim of this paper is to assess whether the survey and ecological estimates of voter swing between two elections are significantly different. For this purpose I will consider the 2006 and 2008 Italian Parliamentary elections. Given the short temporal gap between these two elections, both the methods should give reliable estimates, as the shorter the time between the two elections, the fewer the problems which will be encountered by subjects recalling the party they voted for in the previous one, and the fewer the changes which will have taken place in the composition of the population between the two elections. The ecological data I will employ comprise all the votes cast in both of the elections under consideration (2006 and 2008), at the polling station level. In Italy there are about 60,000 polling stations, and I will analyse the data from these using the Goodman Model. The survey data has been provided by Italian National Election Studies (ITANES), and consists of a large representative sample, obtained by interviews conducted by CATI.
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Notes
Schadee and Corbetta (1984).
The most commonly employed ways to re-adjust the coefficient are to use constrained least squares or to apply the estimates obtained by the OLS approach and the RAS algorithm.
The values of the VR coefficients have to be smaller than 0.15 if the population is expressed in fractions, and smaller than 15 if the population is expressed in percentages.
Even though a strong criticism was offered by Herron and Kenneth 2003.
In order to have a more precise national estimate I computed a weighted average by using the number of voters of each district.
Even though the lowest number of people per electoral division is 500, a smaller number can be tolerated to avoid the redistribution a city’s electoral divisions.
Actually, there was another problem in dealing with the so calledjoined voters (in Italianelettori aggiunti), who are the ones who moved into the Trentino-Alto Adige or Valle d’Aosta regions. In the case of local elections, these voters have to vote in their previous municipality, but they can vote in their new place of residence for the Parliamentary Elections. They are included in a special electoral list called “joined voters”. In this case a 20 % difference between two elections was accepted, since the number of voters in such lists is usually very low (no more that 15 voters).
Law 4 August 1993, n. 277, cd. Legge Mattarella
Compulsory voting was practised from 1945 to 1993. The sanctions consisted in the fact that a note saying ”This person did not vote” was made on “good behaviour certificate” (certificato di buona condotta), and the name of the person was written down on a list which stayed public for thirty days, unless the person had a serious reason for objection. These sanctions were eliminated with the law n. 534/1993.
In 2006 Ulivo is grouped together withLa Rosa nel Pugno, because in 2008 the two parties (together with a number of other small parties) formed the PD.
The 2008 UDC electoral result must be considered whilst taking into account the fact that with respect to the 2006 elections this party was no longer part of the main right coalition, formed by the PdL and Lega Nord together with MpA.
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Russo, L. Estimating floating voters: a comparison between the ecological inference and the survey methods. Qual Quant 48, 1667–1683 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-013-9867-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-013-9867-8