2008. Double Issue. Regional and Federal Studies, "Regional Authority in 42 Democracies, 1950–2006: A Measure and Five Hypotheses," with Liesbet Hooghe and Arjan Schakel.

Table of Contents

Measuring Regional Authority

Operationalizing Regional Authority: A Coding Scheme for 42 Countries, 1950–2006

Validation of the Regional Authority Index, by Arjan Schakel

Patterns of Regional Authority

"At no time in recorded history has a single set of units monopolized authority on earth. Large units—empires and states—have always been several jurisdictional layers deep and most medium and even small units have not been uni-level. The resulting pattern is far from uniform. There is massive variation—over historical time and cross-sectionally—in the scope and structure of government.

"How might one conceive variation in government structure? Individuals are encompassed in multiple jurisdictions operating at diverse territorial scales. If we limit our view to general-purpose jurisdictions, the number of government levels for most people living today is between three and six, of which between one and four exist within their national state. Governments are structured as a more or less hierarchical set of multiple, non-intersecting, jurisdictions. All have one or two levels of local government, and one, two, or three levels of intermediate or regional government below the national.

"Why this structure? Why have what appears to be a convoluted pattern of jurisdictions instead of a simpler set-up, the centralized national state? How does the territorial structure of government vary across time and place, and how might one generalize about it? These are fundamental and difficult questions that lie at the heart of a science of politics, and which have been taken up by political philosophers, including Aristotle, Rousseau, and Althusius, and political scientists, such as Karl Deutsch and Robert Dahl."

* * *

2007. Does Occupation Shape Attitudes on Europe: Benchmarking Validity and Parsimony, with Liesbet Hooghe and JingJing Huo. Acta Politica

This article is an inconclusive attempt to measure the influence of occupation on political attitudes. However, in the process we present a frame for evaluating the trade-off between parsimony and validity.

Occupation lies behind most models of individual economic interest, and individual economic interest lies behind most rational accounts of preferences. This article investigates the causal influence of occupation for Euroscepticism. Employing data from the 2003 International Social Science Survey Program survey, we find that a) identity and occupation exert independent effects, b) estimates of the total effect of these variables vary across countries in an explicable way, c) political framing by political parties influences whether Euroscepticism is related to occupation or identity, and d) reliability is a serious issue in measuring occupational location.

* * *

2007. Triangulation and the Square Root Law. Electoral Studies 26: 1-10.

This piece thinks through the virtues of triangulation and sets out a simple formal argument using sampling theory. The article encompasses triangulation within the square-root law which specifies an outer limit for informational accuracy as a function of the volume of information.

Unbeknownst to my colleagues (and most of my friends) most of my recent work has been in the field of methodology and data-gathering. This is (I hope!) a temporary condition forced upon me by circumstances, in particular the desperate need for reasonably valid data on topics of substantive and theoretical importance. With Liesbet Hooghe and several current and former Ph.D. students I am gathering data on political parties, international organizations, and subnational governments. The life of a data-gatherer is, to reverse Hobbes, convivial, collegial, and anything but short.

The article below provides an example of triangulating information from four datasets that suffer from diverse method effects.

* * *

2007. Cross-Validating Data on Party Positioning on European Integration, with Liesbet Hooghe, Marco Steenbergen, and Ryan Bakker. Electoral Studies 26: 23-38.

Our purpose in this article is to cross-validate expert and manifesto measures of party positioning on European integration. We compare these data with each other and with measures from a European election survey and an elite survey of parliamentarians. We find that expert surveys provide the most accurate data for party positioning on European integration. In part, the errors of expert evaluations and electoral manifestos are shared. Both have some difficulty measuring the positioning of small, extreme, parties. But we also detect and explain errors that are unique to each measurement instrument.

For a formal approach to triangulation see the article above.

* * *

2007. Do expert surveys produce consistent estimates of party stances on European integration? Comparing expert surveys in the difficult case of Central and Eastern Europe, with Liesbet Hooghe, Matthew Loveless, Robert Rohrschneider, Marco Steenbergen, Milada Vachudova, Stephen Whitefield. Electoral Studies 26: 23-38.

Expert surveys have been subject to a number of criticisms concerning their ability to produce accurate estimates of party positions. Such criticisms have particular prima facie credibility in new post-Communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe,
where party development is regarded as weak. This paper compares data from two expert surveys independently conducted between 2002 and 2004. We find, contrary to expectations, that there is a remarkable overlap in positions assigned to parties. This suggests the usefulness of expert surveys even in the ‘most difficult’ case of post-Communist party systems. It also suggests that parties in these countries have developed effective means of communicating their positions on major issues.

This is a short article with a long title and author list. I once wrote an article with a yet longer title, comparing European integration with the Carolingian empire. The advantage of that article was that the title conveyed the substance of the paper so well that few read the paper.

* * *

2007. Evaluating Expert Judgments, with Marco Steenbergen. European Journal of Political Research.

Although expert surveys have gained a prominent place in comparative studies of party positions on issues, their validity has been called into question. In this paper, we evaluate some of the validity concerns in the context of our own expert survey on national party positions vis-à-vis European integration. One goal of this paper is to demonstrate that this expert survey produces valid measures of party positions. An equally important goal, however, is to suggest some methods that can help in assessing the quality of expert survey data. These methods, which are rooted in psychometric theory, are applicable in a variety of contexts and are easily implemented.

* * *