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Modeling Latent Information in Voting Data with Dirichlet Process Priors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Richard Traunmüller ,
Andreas Murr  and
Jeff Gill
Richard Traunmüller
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, D-60323, Germany, e-mail: traunmueller@soz.uni-frankfurt.de
Andreas Murr
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, United Kingdom, e-mail: andreas.murr@politics.ox.ac.uk
Jeff Gill*
Affiliation:
Departments of Political Science, Biostatistics, and Surgery, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, United States
*
e-mail: jgill@wustl.edu
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Abstract

We apply a specialized Bayesian method that helps us deal with the methodological challenge of unobserved heterogeneity among immigrant voters. Our approach is based on generalized linear mixed Dirichlet models (GLMDMs) where random effects are specified semiparametrically using a Dirichlet process mixture prior that has been shown to account for unobserved grouping in the data. Such models are drawn from Bayesian nonparametrics to help overcome objections handling latent effects with strongly informed prior distributions. Using 2009 German voting data of immigrants, we show that for difficult problems of missing key covariates and unexplained heterogeneity this approach provides (1) overall improved model fit, (2) smaller standard errors on average, and (3) less bias from omitted variables. As a result, the GLMDM changed our substantive understanding of the factors affecting immigrants' turnout and vote choice. Once we account for unobserved heterogeneity among immigrant voters, whether a voter belongs to the first immigrant generation or not is much less important than the extant literature suggests. When looking at vote choice, we also found that an immigrant's degree of structural integration does not affect the vote in favor of the CDU/CSU, a party that is traditionally associated with restrictive immigration policy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Winter 2015 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: The authors would like to thank the participants at this event, two anonymous referees, and the editors for helpful comments and remarks. Full replication materials for this study are available on the Political Analysis Web site at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/27564.

†

A previous version of this article was presented at the 3rd Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association 2013 in Barcelona.

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