It's all relative: Spatial positioning of parties and ideological shifts

The usefulness of the general class of spatial econometric models, which relaxes the assumption that the observations are independent, has only recently been realised. One particularly fruitful application includes models of parties' ideological change as well as the electoral consequences of p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal of political research 2015-02, Vol.54 (1), p.141-159
Main Author: Williams, Laron K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Competition
Econometric models
Elections
Electoral College
Electoral mandates
ideological change
Ideology
Intellectuals
Matrices
Observation
party competition
Political behavior
Political Parties
Political science
Regression analysis
Social Class
spatial models
spatial regression
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Summary:The usefulness of the general class of spatial econometric models, which relaxes the assumption that the observations are independent, has only recently been realised. One particularly fruitful application includes models of parties' ideological change as well as the electoral consequences of party competition. In these studies, scholars can explicitly model the spatial interconnectedness of political parties in theoretically pleasing ways, producing inferences that are consistent with formal models of party competition, but are beyond the grasp of traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. To illustrate these benefits, this article replicates Adams and Somer‐Topcu's 2009 study of parties' responses to ideological shifts by rival parties to show that appropriately modeling patterns of interconnectivity between parties via weights matrices provides more realistic inferences that are more consistent with formal models of party competition.
ISSN:0304-4130
1475-6765
DOI:10.1111/1475-6765.12063