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16 November 2009

Greiner on "Exit Polling and Racial Bloc Voting"

Please join us at the Applied Statistics workshop this Wednesday, November 18th at 12 noon when we will be happy to have Jim Greiner of the Harvard Law School presenting on "Exit Polling and Racial Bloc Voting: Combining Individual-Level and R x C Ecological Data." Jim has provided a companion paper with the following abstract:

Despite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a necessary part of many areas of quantitative inference, including in United States voting rights litigation. Ecological inference suffers from a lack of identification that, most agree, is best addressed by incorporating individual-level data into the model. In this paper, we test the limits of such an incorporation by attempting it in the context of drawing inferences about racial voting patterns using a combination of an exit poll and precinct-level ecological data; accurate information about racial voting patterns is needed to trigger voting rights laws that can determine the composition of United States legislative bodies. Specifically, we extend and study a hybrid model that addresses two-way tables of arbitrary dimension. We apply the hybrid model to an exit poll we administered in the City of Boston in 2008. Using the resulting data as well as simulation, we compare the performance of a pure ecological estimator, pure survey estimators using various sampling schemes, and our hybrid. We conclude that the hybrid estimator offers substantial benefits by enabling substantive inferences about voting patterns not practicably available without its use.

Both the paper and the technical appendix are on the course website.

The Applied Statistics workshop meets each Wednesday in room K-354, CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St). We start at 12 noon with a light lunch, with presentations beginning around 12:15 and we usually wrap up around 1:30 pm. We hope you can make it.

Posted by Matt Blackwell at November 16, 2009 9:00 AM