Title:      A Compositional-Hierarchical Model of Abstention
under Compulsory Voting (poster)

Authors:    Gabriel Katz

Entrydate:  2008-06-18 15:16:11

Keywords:   compulsory voting, abstention, compositional data,
hierarchical modelling, MCMC.

Abstract:   Invalid voting and electoral absenteeism are two
important sources of abstention in compulsory voting systems.
Previous studies in this area have not considered the
correlation between both variables and ignored the compositional
nature of the
data, potentially leading to unfeasible results and discarding
helpful information from an inferential standpoint. In order to
overcome these problems, this paper develops a statistical model
that accounts for the compositional and hierarchical structure of
the data and addresses robustness concerns raised by the use of
small samples that are typical in the literature. The model is
applied to analyze invalid voting and electoral absenteeism in
Brazilian legislative elections between 1945 and 2006 via MCMC
simulations. The results show considerable differences in the
determinants of both forms of non-voting; while invalid voting
was strongly positively related both to political protest and to
the existence of important informational barriers to voting, the
influence of these variables on absenteeism is less evident.
Comparisons based on posterior simulations indicate that the
model developed in this paper fits the dataset better than
several alternative modeling approaches and leads to different
substantive conclusions regarding the effect of different
predictors on the both sources of abstention.


http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=758

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