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What Can Instrumental Variables Tell Us About Nonresponse In Household Surveys and Political Polls?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2019

Coady Wing Open the ORCID record for Coady Wing [Opens in a new window]
Coady Wing*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, 1315 East Tenth Street, Room 339A, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. Email: cwing@indiana.edu
*
*Email: cwing@indiana.edu
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Abstract

This paper introduces an instrumental variables framework for analyzing how external factors that affect survey response rates can also affect the composition of the sample of respondents. The method may be useful for studying survey representativeness, and for assessing the effectiveness of some of the conventional corrections for survey nonresponse bias.

The paper applies the method to data collected in the 2011 Swiss Electoral Study (SES), in which survey participation incentives were randomly assigned across members of the original survey sample. The empirical analysis shows that the incentives increased response rates substantially. Estimates of a new instrumental variable parameter called the Complier Average Survey Response (CASR) suggest that the incentives induced participation among people with more nationalist political opinions than those who would have participated without the incentives. Weighting the respondent data to match the covariate distribution in the target population did not account for the discrepancy in attitudes between the two groups, suggesting that the weights would not succeed in removing nonresponse bias.

Keywords

instrumental variablessurvey experimentsself-selection
Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 320 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. 

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Footnotes

Author’s note: Thanks are due to Doug Wolf, Peter Steiner, John Mullahy, Austin Nichols, Vivian Wong, Ted Joyce, Oliver Lipps, Seth Freedman, Alex Hollingsworth, Jeanette Samyn, and Patrick Carlin who provided helpful comments on early drafts of the paper. Comments from the editor and reviewers also improved the paper substantially. Replication files for the results presented in the paper are available as Wing (2018) at doi:10.7910/DVN/ILTOGF.

Contributing Editor: R. Michael Alvarez

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