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Estimating subnational preferences across the European Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2019

Jana Lipps  and
Dominik Schraff Open the ORCID record for Dominik Schraff [Opens in a new window]
Jana Lipps
Affiliation:
Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Dominik Schraff*
Affiliation:
Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: dominik.schraff@eup.gess.ethz.ch
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Abstract

Subnational analyses of political preferences are substantively relevant and offer advantages for causal inference. Yet, our knowledge on regional political preferences across Europe is limited, not least because there is a lack of adequate data. The rich Eurobarometer (EB) data is a promising source for European-wide regional information. Yet, it is only representative for the national level. This paper compares state-of-the-art methods for estimating regional preferences from nationally representative EB data, validating predictions with regionally representative surveys. Our analysis highlights a number of challenges for estimating regional preferences across Europe, such as data availability, variable selection, and over-fitting. We find that predictions are best using a Bayesian additive regression tree with synthetic post-stratification.

Keywords

Multi-level and hierarchical models
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 197 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019

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Supplementary material: Link

Lipps and Schraff Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RHAXDD
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Lipps and Schraff supplementary material

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