Reinventing election studies

Electoral Studies 21 (2002) 331–338www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud

Reinventing election studies

Mark Franklin a,*, Christopher Wlezienb

a Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, USAb Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1NF, UK

Abstract

In this article, we summarize some of the main findings and implications of the papersincluded in this Special Issue, and draw our own conclusions about the likely future of electionstudies. 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Design; Innovation; Linkage; Endogeneity; Context

Electoral research is at a time of flux. As the articles in this Special Issue haveshown, the traditional monolithic survey-based research project, designed to studyvoting behavior at a particular election (Knight and Marsh, 2001), is seen by manyto be approaching the end of its useful life. Change is being forced on those of uswho do electoral research; forced by the imperatives of our evolving research ques-tions, and by individuals who see the opportunity for change in the dominant para-digm. There have always been those who have opposed the monolithic election study,but the evolving nature of the substantive questions on the agenda of electoralresearch have given such individuals new arguments and new allies. Of course, thesenew arguments are only possible because of huge advances in our knowledge. Westand ‘on the shoulders of giants’, and we have the benefit of the longer view thatthis vantage point gives us. In this concluding article we survey the developmentsthat have changed the intellectual climate within which election studies are conduc-ted, and the opportunities that these changes present for future electoral research —opportunities which, in our view, utterly trump any arguments against the continu-ation of election studies.

The first thing that has changed is the relative balance of the primary objectives

* Corresponding author. Tel.:+1-860-297-5292; fax:+1-860-297-5328..E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Franklin), christopher.wlezien@

nuffield.ox.ac.uk (C. Wlezien).

0261-3794/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S0261 -3794(01 )00024-5

332 M. Franklin, C. Wlezien / Electoral Studies 21 (2002) 331–338

in election studies, from a focus on one election as a locus for research to a focuson adding to the series of election studies currently in existence. Instead of providingtwo or three thousand cases for a stand-alone analysis of voting behavior at oneelection, a new study is increasingly seen as adding one case to a time-series ofelectoral data for a particular country or countries (Curtice, 2001). This shift wasinevitable as election studies accumulated. A time-series provides a means to analyzechange, and it is the changing balance of electoral forces and the way in whichelections effectuate changes in government personnel and policies that has come tobe the overriding concern of those who study them. When a series was only a fewelections long, the ability to use the series to study change was very limited, althoughsome nevertheless made the most of it (e.g. Stokes, 1966). As the series lengthens,so the analytic tools that can be brought to bear become increasingly sophisticatedand the payoff in time-serial leverage of each additional case comes increasingly torival in importance the payoff to be gained from the analysis of individual votingbehavior at that election. This should continue to be true at least for the foresee-able future.

In the United States, a time-series of presidential election studies now spans thesecond half of the 20th century. Linked studies have been conducted at each presi-dential election starting with that in 1952, covering 12 elections in all (13 when theelection study of 2000 is completed). In Germany and Sweden the time-series ofnational election studies approaches the same length as in the United States. In Bri-tain and several other countries the total number of elections studied now stands atten. Ten to twelve cases is still a small N for time-series analysis, but it is vergingon the number that permits simple models to be tested.1 And over the next decadewe will acquire the capacity to study pooled time-series of 12 or more cases forever-increasing numbers of countries. This has obvious benefits: for one, it increasesthe power of our statistical tests. Some of the potential of such pooled time-seriesalready has been shown in the analysis of Eurobarometer data which extends backto the early 1970s for nine countries and which, while not explicitly linked to theoccurrence of national elections, permits scholars to extract surveys conducted withinthree months of each election in each country. From these surveys nine series of‘quasi-election studies’ can be constructed, permitting pooled time-series analyseswith Ns of 30 cases or more. Some such studies are in progress, although none, toour knowledge, has yet been published. An early exercise in pooling national electionstudies can be found in Franklin et al. (1992), which achieved an effective N of 39cases by pooling between one and three election studies (or quasi-election studies)from 16 countries. The ability to view elections in time-series perspective providesone of the major themes of the papers in this Special Issue.

Mention of Eurobarometer data suggests a second major change in the intellectualclimate within which election studies are conducted. The first election studies werealso among the first studies of public opinion using nationwide probability samples.

1 Witness the literature on election prediction and forecasting (Wlezien and Erikson, 1996; Campbelland Garand, 2000).

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So all scholars interested in public opinion research were forced to use these data.There were no other data available for this purpose. Over the past 50 years, however,there has been a proliferation of academic studies of public opinion. In particular,the General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Centerat the University of Chicago since 1970, and copied in several other countries, pro-vides an alternative means for studying the nature and dynamics of public opinion,and a means more suited to studying certain types of change which are hard tocapture in surveys conducted only every four years or so (see Wlezien, 1995). GSS-type surveys are generally conducted annually, which also means that a useful time-series becomes available much more quickly than with election studies. Already theAmerican GSS contains the best part of 30 annual cases. The Eurobarometer, whichuntil recently was conducted twice a year, accumulated even faster and now com-prises close to 50 studies.

The changes in focus from static to dynamic, and from election studies as theonly barometer of public opinion to election studies as one of several alternativebarometers, are by no means the only changes affecting the intellectual climate ofelectoral research. Just as important as the ability to view electoral decisions intemporal perspective has been the increasing ability to view electoral decisions withinthe specific context in which they occur. Several of the articles in this Special Issuehave focussed on the way in which contextual information can be linked to surveydata to provide powerful tools that cannot be supplied by survey data alone. Marsh’sarticle (Marsh, 2001) stresses the fact that, unless we take context into account, manyof our models of voting behavior can be badly mis-specified. The linkage to contex-tual information can occur within national surveys, with respondents from differentparts of a country being supplied with additional variables that define the uniquecontexts within which they are embedded. Contextual information can also be addedto survey data by virtue of the temporal location of each survey in a series of electionstudies. In this way the characteristics of the electoral context can be employed tostudy effects that would have been constant within any one election study. Inaddition, the increasing availability of comparable studies from different countriesenables researchers to link the information pertaining to each voter in their study toinformation about the political system in which that voter resides. Such linkageshave turned out to have a powerful effect on the nature of electoral decisions —bringing the state back in by coding differences in institutional structures, and bring-ing parties and party systems back in by coding differences in party structures. Thistype of linkage (cross-temporal as well as cross-national) also promises to permitdirect estimation of the effects of economic conditions and other macro-level vari-ables. Until now, these kinds of variables have generally been employed in surveyresearch only to the extent that respondents have perceptions of these conditions thatcould meaningfully be measured and used as independent variables — van der Eijk(2001) stressed the limitations of this approach.

These multiple windows onto the political world have opened two related butdifferent possibilities. First, they have made it possible for us to triangulate from onestudy to another by making use of the fact that different scholars have approached thesame theoretical issues in different ways. They have asked different questions, or


the same questions at different times, or in different places, giving us the possibilityof adding a perspective akin to binocular vision. Second, they have made it possiblefor scholars to link their surveys in ways that were discussed by van der Eijk (2001)and will be discussed further below. Both of these strategies require co-ordinationbetween studies, a point to which we return.

These exciting new opportunities have brought with them daunting new problems.The first problem that needs to be clearly recognized is the loss of primacy. Electionstudies are no longer the only (and to many scholars no longer the primary) meansfor studying public opinion. For this reason, many in the scholarly community wishto economize on scarce resources by drastically curtailing, if not eliminating, expen-diture on these studies. This threat has been present for years and in some countrieshas prevented a viable series of national election studies from being established,eliminating many of the opportunities for elaborating the electoral research enterpriseoutlined above and detailed in this Special Issue. It seems to us that the only defenseagainst this attack on election studies is for these studies to embrace the changesthat the new intellectual climate has made possible. Other research designs that com-pete with election studies for scarce funding will certainly embrace these changes.If election studies do not change, they are likely to be eliminated. The choice is asstark as that.

Some of the opportunities for change and some of the means for taking advantageof these opportunities have been the subjects of papers in this Special Issue. Nodoubt many other opportunities exist, and many other means for taking advantageof the opportunities than those explored here. The objective of these papers — likethe objective of the initiating conference — was not to come up with definitiveproposals in each and every case, but simply to begin a dialog that would exploresome of the opportunities available.

The most important of the opportunities, at least as seen through the eyes of con-tributors to this volume, is the opportunity to confront and perhaps even tame theendogeneity problem. This problem, which Cees van der Eijk considers in this issue,is essentially one of acquiring information about the world that is independent ofvoters’ own assessments. If we treat voters as experts and ask them about the policiesof the parties they choose between, or about the economic circumstances they experi-ence, then we risk the answers being contaminated by the political orientation of our‘expert’ witnesses. When we then use those answers as independent variables in astudy of political orientations, our analysis is flawed because of circularity.

Even if we have access to wholly external information about the locality in whichindividuals reside, Johnson et al. (2001) have shown that we can be mistaken inthinking that this information is exogenous (if individuals could have chosen theirplace of abode, giving rise to selection effects). That article suggests a possiblesolution to the problem of selection effects. But it is important to note (as pointedout in the introduction to that article) that these effects only operate in relation tocontexts that people could realistically select between. Even with the extent of con-temporary international migration, proportionately few individuals get to choose theinstitutional setting within which they live, yielding some robustness against selec-tion effects in the case of contexts derived from different countries (Marsh, 2001).


And no respondent to a normal survey gets to choose the time at which they aresurveyed. Contextual variables that vary over time would seemingly be free fromselection effects (Erikson, 2001; Johnston and Brady, 2001), although of course theyare instead subject to compositional effects — demographic shifts linked to gener-ational replacement, population growth, and other processes that change the compo-sition of the population under study. This topic is not specifically covered in any ofthe papers contributed to this Special Issue, but compositional effects of this kind(the words are sometimes used with a different meaning) are important potentialcontaminants that need to be taken into account in any cross-temporal research ende-avor,2 except perhaps one using a rolling cross-section design that spans only a veryshort period.3

There is no such thing as a free lunch. All attempts to link data from one studywith data from another are fraught with difficulty, whether the linkage be cross-level, over time, or between different samples drawn at the same point in time andat the same level of analysis. A second set of problems, related particularly to cross-level linkages — problems of achieving adequate numbers of cases at the higherlevel of aggregation — are discussed in the paper by Stoker and Bowers (2001).These problems are, of course, also pertinent to data collection efforts that straddledifferent national contexts (Marsh, 2001).4 Nevertheless, linking data from differentlevels, different times, and different samples offers promise of addressing many ofthe contemporary problems facing election studies. Links to different levels and dif-ferent times will yield the gain of large numbers of variables additional to thosespecifically asked about in election surveys (and variables which are, incidentally,largely free from endogeneity problems). Links to different samples will allow elec-tion studies to focus not only on the vote and allied concepts, which are then availablefor linking to more specialized surveys, but also to focus with the power of thosespecialized surveys on such topics as economic voting, social–psychological theoriesof voting, campaign or media effects, and so on. Moreover, the survey strategies ofthese studies can be optimally designed for their primary purposes, often economiz-ing on sample size in order to be able to afford to measure more variables evenwhile the core election study can maximize its sample size because it has sloughedoff so much of its customary weight. Increased sample size is what is needed most(see Zaller, 2001) to address a fundamental problem shared by most election studies:the lack of power to detect communication effects even of large magnitude, such asthose that happen during political campaigns. But increased sample size would beprohibitively expensive for the traditional monolithic election study. Linking a mass-

2 See Franklin and Ladner (1995) for an example of the way in which compositional effects havebedeviled our understanding of an historical event.

3 But in that case, instead one has the problem of chance differences in composition between a numberof relatively small samples (see Knight and Marsh, 2001).

4 It is interesting to note that a procedure advocated by Stoker and Bowers, of sampling differentnumbers of individuals in different contexts, is the solution forced upon early EES and CSES studies bythe very enterprise of acquiring data across national contexts.


ive core election study with a massive study of campaign effects would not, however,be out of the question. Other linked studies could be much smaller.

By defining individuals in terms of characteristics relevant to different researchconcerns we provide all the specificity that is needed for social science survey-basedresearch. Survey researchers are not interested in specific individuals, only in classesof individuals. So nothing is lost by linking datasets provided the classes of individ-uals of interest to different research enterprises are adequately identified. This doesnot mean that linking datasets is straightforward. There is a linkage problem, astouched on by van der Eijk (2001). One needs to incorporate into the data from anelection study a large number of linkage variables; variables whose sole purpose isto delineate as accurately as possible, and in as much detail as possible, the character-istics of each voter that define the ways in which that voter would be expected todiffer from other voters on the basis of the different theories that might be broughtto bear by researchers with different substantive concerns. To link with sociologicalstudies, we need variables specifying social location; to link with media studies, weneed variables specifying media consumption; to link with psychological studies, weneed variables relating to psychological profile; and so on. Temporal and multi-levellinkages might appear more straightforward, and certainly it is true that a date is adate and a place is a place. But dates do not always define the relevant position ofindividuals in a developing temporal context;5 and the aggregate-level context ofrelevance to a particular research design might not be geographic (see Marsh, 2001).

Indeed, it might be thought that the linkage variables needed in order to make anelection study truly useful to all its potential users would rival in number the variablesthat would have been needed in a traditional study that tried to be all things to allsocial scientists. But this is not so. For one thing, very many of the linkages thatmight be of interest are geographically based. Many contextual variables are sup-posed to have their effect because of geographic proximity; and geographic locationis easily coded with as great an accuracy as privacy laws permit. For another thing,many of the interests of social scientists in different sub-fields can be met by usingidentical linkage variables: the standard demographic variables of occupation, edu-cation, age, income, religion and union membership go a long way, in conjunctionwith geographic and temporal information, towards determining the media marketin which respondents find themselves, as well as the social stratum and social–psychological profile that is likely to be theirs.

Election studies will certainly have to provide linkage variables beyond geographiclocation and standard demographics, and sub-fields with particular linkage needs willhave to make those needs known to the directors of national election studies. Buteven quite coarse categories can prove adequate for achieving quite complex link-ages,6 and it will often prove possible for researchers in one sub-field to make pro-ductive use of linkage variables originally intended for quite different purposes. Gen-

5 For an example, see Franklin et al. (1992, chap. 19).6 See Franklin (1991) for an example that involved linking two waves of the 1989 European Election

Study (two waves that constituted independent samples), using only standard demographic variables tocreate a ‘quasi-panel’ study.


erally, the required degree of specificity needed for linkage to a new sub-field, oncestandard demographic and geographic identifiers are in place, should be achievableby the addition of only a handful of variables instead of the literally dozens neededto do justice to the research questions specific to that sub-field. The very fact thatdifferent social sciences, and different sub-fields within those social sciences, all dealwith human beings (and to a large extent borrow from each other their understandingof what constitutes a human being) ensures that the number of ways in which aperson can be characterized is not limitless.

Nevertheless, in our view, election studies should abandon any attempt to be allthings to all social scientists. Instead, they should focus on only two things: providingadequate linkage variables for use by other specialists, and providing the best poss-ible characterization of the nature and concomitants of the voting act (van der Eijk,2001). This change of focus should enable political scientists who study electionsto direct their substantive attention to what they know best and leave to others theimplementation of research designs specific to other sub-fields. It should also permitthe directors of election studies proper to give more attention to sampling strategiesfor adequately representing groups and contexts of relevance to the largest possiblevariety of research questions (van der Eijk, 2001; Marsh, 2001; Stoker and Bow-ers, 2001).7

Specialization of this kind should yield the same sort of comparative advantagefor election studies as it does in other areas of social and economic life. Indeed, theproductivity of social scientists employing election studies in their work may wellbe much increased as a consequence. Reinvented in this way, election studies willhave a future that seems to us to be very bright.

As mentioned in our introduction to this Special Issue, many of the innovationsoutlined by our contributors have already made their way (or are currently makingtheir way) into contemporary election studies. The ‘probability to vote’ questionsare already employed in a large and growing number of election studies. Focussingon the core business of election studies has already happened in the European Elec-tion Studies and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project because it hasproved impossible to field more than a minimum number of questions in identicalterms across any large number of countries. For other reasons, Johnston and Brady’srolling cross-section design was used in the Annenberg study of voter preferencesduring the 2000 presidential election campaign, and Stoker and Bowers’ multi-leveldesign has been incorporated into the American National Election Study itself. So

7 The biggest risk associated with such a development seems to us to be the possibility that particularaspects of the electoral situation (for example, perceptions by voters of the policy positions taken byparties and candidates) will be neglected in particular elections if they are no longer embedded in the‘core’ study. For this reason, certain questions (such as those measuring the salience of particular issuesto individual voters) may need to be included in these ‘ reinvented’ election studies in the interest ofmaintaining the long-term time-series, and for fear that they would not otherwise be measured at all. Weforesee considerable disagreement about which variables should be contained in the core; but, even ongenerous assumptions about what needs to be included in a time-series of election data, the result shouldstill be a much more parsimonious (and cheaper) election study than is currently the norm.


the future development of election studies is already in progress along lines outlinedin the papers included in this symposium. It is well known that predicting the futureis difficult but, in the wake of these developments in the design of election studies,prediction is a breeze. The future, it appears, is already here.

Acknowledgements

We thank Cees van der Eijk and two anonymous reviewers for helpful commentson earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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Reinventing election studies