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Measuring Knowledge of Parties’ Legislative Seat Shares

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2017

Seonghui Lee ,
Agustina Haime  and
Randolph Stevenson
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Abstract

We use two original surveys (including survey experiments) conducted the week before the 2015 elections in the Britain and Denmark to explore the best method for measuring individuals’ knowledge of the partisan distribution of legislative seats in multi-party democracies. The complete lack of such questions in the corpus of survey research on multi-party democracies is a testament to the skepticism that many survey researchers have about the feasibility of such complex questions. However, our analysis, which is the first empirical test of this skepticism, reveals little evidence of respondents’ frustration or high levels of non-cooperation with these questions. Additionally, our survey experiments, which examine the usefulness of different question formats, make it clear that such questions should be framed in terms of the numbers of seats each party holds rather than shares or percentages of seats.

Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 185 - 196
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Seonghui Lee (slee@ps.au.dk), Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Agustina Haime (Agustina.Haime@rice.edu), Ph.D candidate and Randolph Stevenson (randystevenson@rice.edu), Professor, Department of Political Science, Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, TX.

References

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Fortunato, David, and Stevenson, Randolph T.. 2013. ‘Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation’. American Journal of Political Science 57(2):459–477.Google Scholar
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Mondak, Jeffery J., and Creel Davis, Belinda. 2001. ‘Asked and Answered: Knowledge Levels When We Will Not Take “Don’t Know” for an Answer’. Political Behavior 23(3):199–224.Google Scholar
Mondak, Jeffrey J., and Anderson, Mary R.. 2004. ‘The Knowledge Gap: A Reexamination of Gender-Based Differences in Political Knowledge’. Journal of Politics 66(2):492–512.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Lee et al Dataset

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NQ32VR
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Lee et al supplementary material

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