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Estimating Constituency Opinion in Britain

估计英国选民的意见

基本信息

批准号：
ES/K003666/1
负责人：
Nick Vivyan
金额：
$ 14.83万
依托单位：
Durham University
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2013
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2013 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FK003666%2F1
关键词：
Estimating Constituency Opinion Britain

项目摘要

Today in Britain we have a very clear picture of political opinion in the general population. By surveying a nationally representative sample of citizens, researchers regularly make accurate inferences regarding, for example, what proportion of British voters approve of a specific policy, or which political issue is most important to the largest number of Britons. Yet when we zoom in to look at political opinion at the level of the Parliamentary constituency, the picture is not nearly as clear. For even though they are the basic unit of representation in British politics, each choosing a single Member of Parliament (MP) to send to Westminster, we have very little systematic information about political opinion in individual constituencies. This is because gathering such information using traditional polling techniques is prohibitively expensive: researchers would need to survey a sufficient number of voters in each separate constituency, meaning an extremely large overall sample size. This all matters because we need to measure political opinion at the constituency-level if we are to answer fundamental questions about the role of constituencies in British representative democracy. For example, is there a meaningful representative link between individual MPs in the House of Commons and their constituents? To what extent do the personal political preferences or political behaviour of individual MPs reflect not just the wishes of the national political party to which they belong, but also political opinion in the constituency they represent? And also, how do changes to constituency boundaries impact upon the electoral fortunes of political parties? So far, research concerning these questions has been hampered by a lack of direct measures of political opinion in constituencies.Our project will remedy this situation. We will exploit major recent methodological advances which have enabled political scientists in the US and Germany to estimate political opinion for multiple small local areas without having to survey an unfeasibly large overall sample of respondents. Instead, these new methods combine information from several existing, publicly available data sources. First, we use data from the British Election Study, which records the political opinions, socio-demographic type and constituency location of a large number of survey respondents, to estimate a statistical model predicting an individual's political opinions as a function of their socio-demographic type and constituency location. We also include Ordinance Survey data on which constituencies neighbour each other, thus allowing for the tendency of people who live in constituencies near to one another to have more similar political opinions than those who live in constituencies further apart. In the second step we generate an estimate of public opinion in each constituency by combining the predictions of our statistical model with Census-based information on the number of people of each socio-demographic type living in that constituency. Through this procedure, we will generate the first systematic constituency-specific measures of: public opinion on specific political issues such as the Iraq War or European Union membership; and opinion on over-arching political questions such as the appropriate balance between government taxation and spending or which is the most important issue facing the UK. We will also use our method to generate new constituency-specific measures of electoral support for each political party. Not only will these new measures allow us to shed new light on important questions concerning the role of the constituency in British representative democracy. They can also help to improve the quality of the link between British citizens and politicians, offering MPs systematic information about the political preferences of their constituents and thus enabling them to be more responsive to the people they represent.

今天在英国，我们对普通民众的政治观点有一个非常清楚的了解。通过调查具有全国代表性的公民样本，研究人员定期做出准确的推断，例如，英国选民中赞成某项特定政策的比例，或者对大多数英国人来说最重要的政治问题。然而，当我们放大来看议会选区一级的政治观点时，情况就不那么清楚了。因为，尽管他们是英国政治中的基本代表单位，每个选区都选出一名国会议员（MP）送到威斯敏斯特，但我们几乎没有关于各个选区政治观点的系统信息。这是因为使用传统的民意调查技术收集此类信息的成本过高：研究人员需要在每个单独的选区调查足够数量的选民，这意味着总体样本量非常大。这一切都很重要，因为如果我们要回答有关选区在英国代议制民主中的作用的基本问题，我们就需要衡量选区层面的政治观点。例如，下议院的个别议员与他们的选民之间是否存在有意义的代表联系？个别议员的个人政治取向或政治行为在多大程度上不仅反映了他们所属的全国性政党的意愿，而且反映了他们所代表的选区的政治意见？此外，选区边界的变化如何影响政党的选举命运？到目前为止，由于缺乏对选区政治观点的直接测量，有关这些问题的研究一直受到阻碍，我们的项目将弥补这一情况。我们将利用最近取得的重大方法进步，这些进步使美国和德国的政治科学家能够估计多个小的局部地区的政治观点，而不必调查一个不切实际的大样本的受访者。相反，这些新的方法结合了联合收割机从几个现有的，公开可用的数据源的信息。首先，我们使用的数据从英国选举研究，记录了大量的调查受访者的政治观点，社会人口类型和选区位置，估计一个统计模型预测个人的政治观点作为其社会人口类型和选区位置的函数。此外，我们亦把条例调查所得的数据，包括哪些选区是邻近的，这样便可考虑到居住在邻近选区的市民，较居住在相距较远选区的市民，有较多相同的政治意见。在第二步中，我们将统计模型的预测与基于人口普查的有关居住在该选区的每种社会人口类型的人数的信息相结合，生成每个选区的民意估计。通过这一程序，我们将产生第一个系统性的选区具体措施：公众舆论对特定的政治问题，如伊拉克战争或欧盟成员国;和意见过度的政治问题，如政府税收和支出之间的适当平衡，或这是英国面临的最重要的问题。我们还将使用我们的方法为每个政党制定新的针对具体选区的选举支持措施。这些新措施不仅将使我们能够对有关选区在英国代议制民主中的作用的重要问题有新的认识。它们还有助于提高英国公民与政治家之间联系的质量，为议员提供有关其选民政治偏好的系统信息，从而使他们能够更好地响应他们所代表的人民。