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Special Issues on "Election Forecasting Technqiues (Part II)" - Editorial
No full textShort introduction to co-edited special issue
Election Forecasting Techniques - Part I
No full textThis is the first of two special issues devoted to current topics and innovative approaches in the field of election forecasting techniques. The articles included in these special issues were submitted to the journal after a call for papers was circulated in mid-2013, soliciting contributions that advance the current state of the literature and/or promote novel approaches to political opinion polling, with special emphasis on uses of forecasting techniques of election results.
The articles hosted in the two issues cover topics ranging from exit polls, explanatory statistical models based on structural variables (economic trends, government approval ratings, etc.), prediction markets, social media-based election forecasting, the web as a means to collect data on voting preferences, and measures
of forecast accuracy.
In the first contribution appearing in this issue, titled “Evolving approaches to election forecasting” (the only invited article), Jocelyn Evans examines major approaches to electoral forecasting and discusses their distinctive traits and the constraints which render them variably useful in specific research contexts. He also
addresses the growing use of forecasting tools, stressing the need to adapt techniques originally developed in order to achieve other goals and to not lose track of researchers’ major purpose when employing these techniques, which is to say a greater comprehension of how elections actually work.
As regards prediction markets, an interesting article submitted to the journal is “Accuracy and bias in European prediction markets”, by Sveinung Arnesen and Oliver Strijbis. The paper describes how prediction markets work, specifically the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), and provides a meta-analysis of the scores from 62 prediction market vote share contracts for elections in Switzerland, Germany, and Norway. The aim of the paper is to uncover potential biases in forecasting by comparing them with the actual results. The authors show that there is an aggregate bias in the predictions: the actual outcomes tend to have more extreme values than predicted, so that European prediction markets would be biased. Specifically, they show that small-sized vote share contracts tend to be overpredicted, and large-sized vote share contracts tend to be underestimated. The major result reported in this contribution appears to invite researchers to a cautious use of the logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR) as an automated market maker in vote share markets.
In “Assessing correct voting: A study based on a simulation of municipal elections in Italy”, Giancarlo Gasperoni and Debora Mantovani offer an empirical application of “correct voting” to the Italian political system. The authors estimate correct voting using data collected through the development of an on-line simulation of an Italian election campaign implemented via a “dynamic process-tracing environment”. A typology of voting behaviour is then proposed which combines both correct voting models and the traditional approach distinguishing between political subculture belonging and opinion-based voting among Italian voters. Four multinomial logistic regression models are developed in which the dependent variable is the above-mentioned typology of voting behaviour; the authors use these models to test hypotheses on voting behaviour according to which voters are more likely to vote “correctly” if they express high levels of interest in politics and high degrees of political competence, and if they are “active” seekers of information during the simulated election campaign. Findings show that voters are more likely to vote correctly if they express higher levels of interest in politics, but the effect of political competence is statistically insignificant. Moreover, voters are not more likely to vote correctly if they are “generally active” seekers of flow items concerning candidates’ issues orientations, but they are more likely to vote correctly if they are “specific active” seekers of information concerning their “correct” candidates’ issue orientations.
A further article deals with “Forecasting elections with high volatility”, by Antonio F. Alaminos. In the article, Alaminos proposes the use of a combination of aggregated electoral data from the 1994 German Bundestag elections and the 1998 German Allbus social survey to estimate four probabilistic models of forecasting the German 1998 general elections. The models are built following the logic of Markov chains which, according to the author, make it possible to account for the large electoral volatility observed in the German elections across the 1990s. The forecasts based on the four models perform better than those provided by other techniques, in terms of predicting the winning party and the position of the second and third parties. In addition, the author demostrates that, among the four proposed models, the two corrected models – which assume that there are restrictions to electoral mobility – behave better than the two other pure Markov chain models, which assume that all voters can change their electoral choice.
This first issue of the double-issue set concludes with contributions drawn from a round table discussion dedicated to election forecasting, which took place on February 15, 2013, in Milan during a national conference on “The Value of Statistics for Businesses and Society: Opinion and Market Research” promoted by the Association for Applied Statistics (ASA), the Association for Market, Social, and Opinion Research (ASSIRM), the Italian Statistics Society (SIS), and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan
Indicatori di valutazione della qualità della ricerca negli atenei: sensibilità, sostituibilità e capacità discriminatoria
No full textNell'articolo si sperimentano alcuni indicatori di qualità della ricerca universitaria utilizzati per il primo esercizio valutativo della qualità della ricerca ed altri utilizzabili in alternativa a quelli utilizzati. La sperimentazione riguarda sia il modo di calcolare gli indicatori, sia la valutazione statistica della loro sostituibilità e sensibilità
A characterisation of corruption risk in public procurement through social network analysis
No full textMethods of Item Analysis in Standardized Student Assessment: an Application to an Italian Case Study
No full textThe aim of the paper is to outline how different psychometric methods can be used for item analysis in the field of standardized educational assessment, with reference to an Italian case study. The research is stimulated by the increasing relevance acknowledged to standardized tests within the Italian context in the last few years. Further, the authors believe that conducting a rigorous analysis of pretested items represents a fundamental requirement for a fair and effective learning evaluation. In particular, the joint use of indicators derived from classical test theory and item response theory models is discussed. The main results of analysis of pretested items for the 2009 Italian National Test of reading comprehension in the second grade of primary school show that, despite the two methods being consistent, both proved important in highlighting different item properties and in detecting weak items
The Quality of Life in the Historic Centre of Naples: The Use of PLSPM Models to Measure the Well-Being of the Citizens of Naples
No full textHow do the citizens of the historic centre of a city perceive the quality of their living conditions? The objective of this research has been to identify a series of indicators focused on the crucial aspects that, directly or indirectly, influence and determine the level of well-being of individuals and local communities in the city of Naples, describing and measuring specific social and local phenomena. In the survey, the same dimensions of the BES (Benessere Equo Sostenibile – Equitable and Sustainable Well-being) have been considered, together with others added ad hoc, relating to topics such as tourism and district, factors closely related to the character of the city’s historic centre. In this paper we propose the use of Structural Equation Models, estimated using the Partial Least Squares-Path Modeling method, to measure the perception of the quality of life and to identify the weights of its dimensions and items
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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