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12 December 2005

PPBW: Hillygus on Ideology

Our final PPBW session of this semester is this Friday, December 16. Sunshine Hillygus will present "The Structure and Meaning of Political Ideology." The paper introduces a new means for operationalizing ideology using item response models on issue questions from the NES. Just what is ideology? Here's the abstract:

Given the focus of media and scholarly attention on the increasingly ideological nature of American politics, it is somewhat surprising that so little is known about the structure and meaning of political ideology in the electorate. In this paper, we estimate a Bayesian issue-based latent measure of ideology estimated using an item response model (IRT). We compare our latent measure of ideology with ideological self-placement, party identification, and vote choice in the 2000 presidential election. The latent measure offers a number of methodological and conceptual advantages, and offers more more complete picture of the belief systems of the American public.

Posted by Barry Burden at December 12, 2005 2:00 PM