Brown Bag Seminar: Mert Moral (Sabancı University)

This Wednesday (March 16@1 pm in FASS 2034) we will have our faculty member Mert Moral as our Brown Bag Seminar series speaker. Dr. Moral's presentation is entitled "Ever Considered (Not) Voting for a Party?" of which the abstract is shared below. Please also find attached Dr. Moral's co-authored article.

Students of voting behavior have not been able to reach a consensus regarding the best way to measure electoral choices. While some use self-reported vote choice items, others employ likelihoods of “ever voting” for each party, the so-called “propensity to vote” (PTV) scores. In this study, we make a case against treating the PTV scores as a direct substitute for the self-reported vote choice in cases where the researchers are interested in the vote decision process. Our case is based on the distinction between short-term, election-specific factors and longer-term constraints on vote decisions. We argue that the PTV questions, by design, are not intended to capture the former. Employing survey data from two canonical studies, the 1994 Dutch Parliamentary and 2002 Irish National Election studies, we decompose the probabilities of vote choice into their long- and shortterm components and compare our predictions against voters’ reported PTVs. While the PTV scores are highly correlated with the predicted probabilities of voters’ consideration of parties in their choice sets, they have a weaker association with the vote choice probability.

We conclude by discussing the methodological issues that might arise from using

PTV questions as dependent variables and suggest that the PTV and self-reported vote choice questions should be used as complementary, rather than substitutable, measures in electoral research.

Please note that this year's Brown Bag seminars will be physical and online. You may use the following the link to join the seminar online:

https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/92915915594

Meeting ID: 929 1591 5594