Classification Accuracy as a Substantive Quantity of Interest: Measuring Polarization in Westminster Systems

• Published in: Political analysis Vol. 26; no. 1; pp. 120 - 128
• Main Authors: Peterson, Andrew, Spirling, Arthur
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press (OUP) 01.01.2018
• Subjects: Computer Science; Document and Text Processing; Humanities and Social Sciences; Methods and statistics; Political science
• ISSN: 1047-1987; 1476-4989
• DOI: 10.7910/DVN/YTPJ1N

Measuring the polarization of legislators and parties is a key step in understanding how politics develops over time. But in parliamentary systems-where ideological positions estimated from roll calls may not be informative-producing valid estimates is extremely challenging. We suggest a new measure...