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Asking About Numbers: Why and How

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Stephen Ansolabehere ,
Marc Meredith  and
Erik Snowberg
Stephen Ansolabehere
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA e-mail: sda@gov.harvard.edu
Marc Meredith
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA e-mail: marcmere@sas.upenn.edu
Erik Snowberg*
Affiliation:
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, and National Bureau of Economic Research
*
e-mail: snowberg@caltech.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

Survey questions about quantities offer a number of advantages over more common qualitative questions. However, concerns about survey respondents' abilities to accurately report numbers have limited the use of quantitative questions. This article shows quantitative questions are feasible and useful for the study of economic voting. First, survey respondents are capable of accurately assessing familiar economic quantities, such as the price of gas. Second, careful question design—in particular providing respondents with benchmark quantities—can reduce measurement error due to respondents not understanding the scale on which more complex quantities, such as the unemployment rate, are measured. Third, combining quantitative and qualitative questions sheds light on where partisan bias enters economic assessments: in perceiving, judging, or reporting economic quantities.

Type
Regular Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Winter 2013 , pp. 48 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: We thank Mike Alvarez, Conor Dowling, Ray Duch, Jon Eguia, Ken Scheve, Emily Thorson, and Chris Wlezien for encouragement and suggestions, and seminar audiences at Columbia, MIT, MPSA, NYU, Temple, Wharton, and Yale for useful feedback and comments. Replication data may be found in Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg (2012). Supplementary Materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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