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Ecological Inference and Entropy-Maximizing: An Alternative Estimation Procedure for Split-Ticket Voting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Ron Johnston  and
Charles Pattie
Ron Johnston
Affiliation:
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK. email: r.johnston@bristol.ac.uk
Charles Pattie
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
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Abstract

Publication of King's A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem has rekindled interest in the estimation of unknown cell values in two- and three-dimensional matrices from knowledge of the marginal sums. This paper outlines an entropy-maximizing (EM) procedure which employs more constraints than King's EI method and produces mathematical rather than statistical procedures: the estimates are maximum-likelihood values. The mathematics are outlined, and the procedure's use illustrated with a study of ticket-splitting at New Zealand's first (1996) general election using the mixed-member proportional representation system, for which official figures provide a check against the EM estimate of the number voting a straight party ticket in each constituency.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , 18 July 2000 , pp. 333 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Society for Political Methodology 

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