Dynamic Pie: A Strategy for Modeling Trade-Offs in Compositional Variables over Time

The substance of politics involves competition that evolves over time. While our theories about competition emphasize trade-offs across multiple categories, most empirical models tend to oversimplify them by considering trade-offs between one category and everything else. We propose a research strat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2016-01, Vol.60 (1), p.268-283
Main Authors: Philips, Andrew Q., Rutherford, Amanda, Whitten, Guy D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
AJPS WORKSHOP
Budgets
Competition
Confidence interval
Conservatism
Expenditures
Intellectuals
Liberalism
Mathematical independent variables
Modeling
Political parties
Political science
Politics
Spending
Statistical significance
Time series models
Trade
Variables
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Summary:The substance of politics involves competition that evolves over time. While our theories about competition emphasize trade-offs across multiple categories, most empirical models tend to oversimplify them by considering trade-offs between one category and everything else. We propose a research strategy for testing theories about trade-off relationships that shape dynamic compositional variables. This approach improves current methods used to analyze compositional dependent variables by addressing two limitations. First, although scholars have considered compositional dependent variables, they have done so in contexts that were not dynamic. Second, current approaches toward graphical presentations become unwieldy when the compositional dependent variable has more than three categories. We demonstrate the utility of our strategy to expand current theories of party support and political budgeting. In both cases, we can extend trade-offs across pairs of alternatives (e.g., prime minister versus all other parties or spending on defense versus everything else) to competition across multiple alternatives.
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/ajps.12204