title:         A STATE-SPACE APPROACH TO ECONOMIC POPULARITY FUNCTIONS
authors:       Mark Pickup
entrydate:     2006-07-11 05:25:24
keywords:
abstract:      Economic popularity functions are central to the debate over whether voters use evaluations of the economy in their decision to support their government or not. This is of particular importance to the key democratic principle of electoral accountability that parties in power should and are held accountable for the outcomes of their actions and policies through the electoral process. Given the evidence from many nations that the economy is an issue of importance to the electorate, which they believe the government has control over, the inconsistent findings with regards to the impact of the economy on party popularity has made conclusive evaluations of the principle of electoral accountability elusive. This study demonstrates that the difficulty lies in a series of methodological flaws found in current approaches to developing popularity functions. Most analysts using public opinion time-series data have not applied the necessary methods to take into account the problems which such data can pose – problems such as complex error structures, shifting and compound non-stationary dynamics and noisy data. Accordingly, this study explicates a state-space Bayesian approach that addresses these methodological issues. In doing so, it outlines a technique that may be applied to a wide range of public opinion dynamic modelling issues.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=612

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