Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T23:24:24.594Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Statistical Analysis of Endorsement Experiments: Measuring Support for Militant Groups in Pakistan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Will Bullock
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Kosuke Imai*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Jacob N. Shapiro
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544

Abstract

Political scientists have long been interested in citizens' support level for such actors as ethnic minorities, militant groups, and authoritarian regimes. Attempts to use direct questioning in surveys, however, have largely yielded unreliable measures of these attitudes as they are contaminated by social desirability bias and high nonresponse rates. In this paper, we develop a statistical methodology to analyze endorsement experiments, which recently have been proposed as a possible solution to this measurement problem. The commonly used statistical methods are problematic because they cannot properly combine responses across multiple policy questions, the design feature of a typical endorsement experiment. We overcome this limitation by using item response theory to estimate support levels on the same scale as the ideal points of respondents. We also show how to extend our model to incorporate a hierarchical structure of data in order to uncover spatial variation of support while recouping the loss of statistical efficiency due to indirect questioning. We illustrate the proposed methodology by applying it to measure political support for Islamist militant groups in Pakistan. Simulation studies suggest that the proposed Bayesian model yields estimates with reasonable levels of bias and statistical power. Finally, we offer several practical suggestions for improving the design and analysis of endorsement experiments.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Authors' note: All of the code necessary to reproduce the results in this paper can be downloaded from the Dataverse as Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro (2011). A previous version of this paper was circulated as “Measuring Political Support and Issue Ownership Using Endorsement Experiments, with Application to the Militant Groups in Pakistan.”

References

Bafumi, J., Gelman, A., Park, D. K., and Kaplan, N. 2005. Practical issues in implementing and understanding Bayesian ideal point estimation. Political Analysis 13: 171–87.Google Scholar
Bafumi, J., and Herron, M. 2010. Leapfrog representation and extremism: A study of American voters and their members in Congress. American Political Science Review 104(3): 519–42.Google Scholar
Blair, G., Fair, C. C., Malhotra, N., and Shapiro, J. N. 2011. Poverty and support for militant politics: Evidence from Pakistan. SSRN Working Paper.Google Scholar
Blair, G., and Imai, K. 2010. Statistical analysis of list experiments. Working paper. http://imai.princeton.edu/research/listP.html.Google Scholar
Bullock, W., Imai, K., and Shapiro, J. N. 2011. Replication data for: Statistical analysis of endorsement experiments: Measuring support for militant groups in Pakistan. hdl:1902.1/14840. The Dataverse Network.Google Scholar
Clinton, J., Jackman, S., and Rivers, D. 2004. The statistical analysis of roll call data. American Political Science Review 98: 355–70.Google Scholar
Clinton, J. D., and Lewis, D. E. 2008. Expert opinion, agency characteristics, and agency preferences. Political Analysis 16: 320.Google Scholar
Cohen, G. L. 2003. Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85: 808–22.Google Scholar
Fair, C. C., Malhotra, N., and Shapiro, J. N. 2009. The roots of militancy: Explaining support for political violence in Pakistan. Working paper. Princeton University.Google Scholar
Gelman, A., and Hill, J. 2007. Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, A., and Rubin, D. B. 1992. Inference from iterative simulations using multiple sequences (with discussion). Statistical Science 7: 457–72.Google Scholar
Gingerich, D. W. 2010. Understanding off-the-books politics: Conducting inference on the determinants of sensitive behavior with randomized response surveys. Political Analysis 18: 349–80.Google Scholar
Heckman, J. J., and Snyder, J. M. 1997. Linear probability models of the demand for attributes with an empirical application to estimating the preferences of legislators. RAND Journal of Economics 28: 142–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holland, P. W. 1986. Statistics and causal inference (with discussion). Journal of the American Statistical Association 81: 945–60.Google Scholar
Imai, K. 2011. Multivariate regression analysis for the item count technique. Journal of the American Statistical Association 106: 407–16.Google Scholar
Kam, C. D. 2005. Who toes the party line? Cues, values, and individual differences. Political Behavior 27: 163–82.Google Scholar
Lax, J. R., and Phillips, J. H. 2009. How should we estimate public opinion in the states? American Journal of Political Science 53: 107–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muraki, E. 1992. A generalized partial credit model: Application of an EM algorithm. Applied Psychological Measurement 16: 159–76.Google Scholar
Nicholson, S. P., Forthcoming 2011. Dominating cues and the limits of elite influence. Journal of Politics.Google Scholar
Pakistan Federal Bureau of Statistics. 2008. Labour force survey 2007-8. Technical report.Google Scholar
Park, D. K., Gelman, A., and Bafumi, J. 2004. Bayesian multilevel estimation with poststratification: State-level estimates from national polls. Political Analysis 12: 375–85.Google Scholar
Peress, M., and Spirling, A. 2010. Scaling the critics: Uncovering the latent dimensions of movie criticism with an item response approach. Journal of the American Statistical Association 105: 7183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plummer, M. 2009. JAGS: Just Another Gibbs Sampler. https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcmc-jags.Google Scholar
Poole, K. T., and Rosenthal, H. 1985. A spatial model for legislative roll call analysis. American Journal of Political Science 29: 357–84.Google Scholar
Rivers, D. 2003. Identification of multidimensional spatial voting models. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Political Science, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Shapiro, J. N., and Fair, C. C. 2010. Why support Islamist militancy? Evidence from Pakistan. International Security 34: 79118.Google Scholar
Sniderman, P. M., and Piazza, T. 1993. The Scar of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
United States Agency for International Development. 2009. Development assistance and counter-extremism: A guide to programming. Technical report. http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/publications/docs/da_and_cea_guide_to_programming.pdf.Google Scholar