Estimating Policy Preferences Using Expert Data

这个项目将收集关于一系列问题的信息，这些问题对我们理解西方民主国家的投票和政党竞争至关重要。这是建立一个关于大量代议制民主政体中关键政治行为者政策偏好的综合数据库的第一阶段。这一阶段的研究涉及对大约1000名国家专家的重大调查，旨在确定政党精英在一系列政策层面上的优先立场。党的政策的这些方面中的大多数以前都不是全面的跨国研究的主题。此外，这项研究还将评估政党领导人的政策偏好与相关政党其他关键部分的政策偏好之间的差异，这些关键部分包括立法者、活动人士和选民。它还将评估领导人对特定政策层面的重要性；每个政党体系中重要的政策层面的数量；政党领导人在多大程度上权衡执政欲望和影响政策产出的愿望；以及每个政党的领导人对政党政策的控制程度。总体结果将使投票和政党竞争的理论和实证分析更加紧密。它们还将为理解政党竞争开辟新的途径，迄今为止，由于对许多关键变量的最模糊估计，这些竞争一直是封闭的。

This project will assemble information on a range of matters that are central to our understanding of voting and party competition in Western democracies. It is the first stage in the construction of a comprehensive database on the policy preferences of key political actors in a large number of representative democracies. This phase of the research involves a major survey of approximately 1,000 country specialists and is designed to establish the preferred positions of party elites on a range of policy dimensions. Most of these aspects of party policy have not before been the subject of comprehensive cross- national research. In addition, the study will estimate differences between the policy preferences of party leaders and those of other key sections of the parties concerned, including legislators, activists and voters. It will also estimate the importance attributed by leaders to particular policy dimensions; the number of policy dimensions that are important in each party system; the extent to which party leaders trade off the desire to get into office against the desire to affect policy outputs; and the extent to which the leaders of each party have control over party policy. The overall results will bring theoretical and empirical analyses of voting and party competition much closer together. They will also open up new approaches to the understanding of party competition that have hitherto been closed off because of even the vaguest estimates of a number of key variables.