Measurement on Benjamin Lauderdale

Pragmatic Social Measurement

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a draft manuscript for a book about measuring social science concepts. The first draft was available on my personal website starting in autumn 2021. I was then occupied with academic administration for four years and was unable to make any progress on revision. This second draft has been available since autumn 2026. Relative to the first publicly available version, this current version has fewer outright errors, grammatical problems, inconsistencies of UK and US spelling, infelicities of language and mathematical expression, missing and inconsistently formatted citations, hideous regression outputs, and other rough edges. But it still has a fair number of each of these. Feedback and suggestions to (b.lauderdale@ucl.ac.uk) remain very much welcome.

Studying Individual-Level Attitudes Towards Important Problems Using Pairwise Comparisons

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How can we measure citizens’ attitudes towards political problems in a way that generates data which are comparable across individuals, across countries, and across time? In this paper, I show how to measure these attitudes using pairwise comparisons, such that the assessments can be used as either individual-level dependent or independent variables for subsequent analyses. Even where it is infeasible for respondents to answer sufficient pairwise comparisons to recover a respondent-level ranked order, model-based multiple imputation enables the analyses that would be possible if all respondents compared all possible pairs of categories. I validate this approach using assessments of political problems in the UK according to the categories of the Comparative Agendas Project. By enabling individual-level analysis on researcher-defined categories with accessible questions, these methods make supplementing or replacing the typical most important problem and issue questions asked on national election studies with pairwise comparisons broadly advantageous for future research.

Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What is the nature of mass opinion on public policies? And what role do citizens’ policy opinions play in their political choices? This book re-examines these questions, which lie at the heart of fundamental debates concerning whether democratic elections can make policymakers responsive to citizens’ policy preferences. Prevailing answers to these questions tend to reflect one of two contrasting perspectives. The ‘ideological voter’ account suggests that citizens’ opinions across different policies are ideologically organised, so that political choice reduces to comparing positions on a small number of ideological dimensions. This simplifies democratic policy responsiveness. The ‘innocent voter’ account suggests that most citizens lack meaningful policy opinions on most issues. They express policy opinions that lack stability and ideological organisation, except where they simply mimic the policies espoused by the parties they support. This severely limits democratic policy responsiveness. This book argues for a third perspective: an ‘idiosyncratic voter’ account. This says that citizens develop meaningful policy opinions on different sets of issues, but the combinations of opinions they form on those issues are often idiosyncratic rather than ideologically organised. An analysis of panel survey data from Britain shows that both the ideological and innocent voter accounts do explain important aspects of mass policy opinion and political choice. Nonetheless, idiosyncratic policy opinion is also widespread and significantly shapes political choices. This means that idiosyncratic opinion serves alongside ideological opinion as an additional starting point for democratic policy responsiveness. Yet it also means that electoral politics is highly multidimensional and therefore volatile.

Polarization over the Priority of Political Problems

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What drives ideological division about political problems? When prioritising which problems are most in need of redress, voters might disagree about the severity of individual outcomes that constitute such problems; the prevalence of those problems; or whether such problems are amenable to solution by government action. We field a large survey experiment in the UK and US and develop a new measurement approach which allows us to evaluate how ideological disagreements change when respondents consider the individual badness, social severity, and priority for government action of a set of 41 political problems. We find that large ideological divergences are observed in beliefs about social severity and priority for government action, not individual problem badness, and only in the US. An important implication of these results is that perceptions of problem prevalence are a key source of polarization over problem-prioritization in the US.

"Moderates"

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many Americans express a mix of conservative and liberal views across issues. Prior research indicates these voters are cross-pressured. A recent, influential article “Moderates” (Fowler et al. 2023) argues that these voters instead largely have centrist views on issues. To reach this conclusion, “Moderates” develops a method to determine which voters’ views are well-summarized by left-right ideology. “Moderates” finds that most voters’ views are, and therefore concludes that the large number of voters with centrist estimated ideologies—“moderates”—must hold centrist views on issues. We show that this method systematically overstates how many voters’ views are well-summarized by left-right ideology: it assumes voters are ideologues unless they either answer questions randomly or form a single cluster with distinctive views. In simulations, we show this bias is large. The article’s core conclusion that voters who express a mix of conservative and liberal views can be inferred to support centrist policies therefore remains in doubt.

Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Very Similar Sets of Foundations When Comparing Moral Violations

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Applications of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) in political science have revealed differences in the degree to which liberals and conservatives explicitly endorse five core moral foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty and sanctity. We argue that differences between liberals and conservatives in their explicit ratings of abstract and generalized moral principles do not imply that citizens with different political orientations have fundamentally different moral intuitions. We introduce a new approach for measuring the importance of the 5 moral foundations by asking UK and US survey respondents to compare pairs of vignettes describing violations relevant to each foundation. We analyse responses to these comparisons using a hierarchical Bradley-Terry model which allows us to evaluate the relative importance of each foundation to individuals with different political perspectives. Our results suggest that, despite prominent claims to the contrary, voters on the left and the right of politics share broadly similar moral intuitions.

Public Preferences over Changes to the Composition of Government Tax Revenue

Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How governments raise tax revenue is at the core of domestic political conflict. Public opinion towards taxation is measured generally and qualitatively by many surveys, but previous research has not closely linked public preferences to the budget problem faced by governments regarding how best to raise or cut a marginal quantity of revenue. We present results from a novel tax preference experiment in which UK respondents are given choices over different tax ‘levers’ that are expected to raise or cut equal revenue. We find that while different tax levers vary substantially in their popularity, there is a ‘hidden consensus’ regarding different tax levers across income levels and partisanship of the respondents.

The Variable Persuasiveness of Political Rhetoric

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Which types of political rhetoric are most persuasive? Politicians make arguments that share common rhetorical elements, including metaphor, ad hominem attacks, appeals to expertise, moral appeals, and many others. However, political arguments are also highly multidimensional, making it difficult to assess the relative persuasive power of these elements. We report on a novel experimental design which assesses the relative persuasiveness of a large number of arguments that deploy a set of rhetorical elements to argue for and against proposals across a range of UK political issues. We find modest differences in the average effectiveness of rhetorical elements shared by many arguments, but also large variation in the persuasiveness of arguments of the same rhetorical type across issues. In addition to revealing that some argument-types are more effective than others in shaping public opinion, these results have important implications for the interpretation of survey-experimental studies in the field of political communication.

A Leader Who Sees the World as I Do: Voters Prefer Candidates Whose Statements Reveal Matching Social-Psychological Attitudes

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Politicians are increasingly able to communicate their values, attitudes, and concerns directly to voters. Yet little is known about which of these signals resonate with voters and why. We employ a discrete choice experiment to investigate whether and which social-psychological attitudes predict how adult British voters respond to corresponding attitudinal signals communicated by candidates in hypothetical social media posts. For all attitudes studied, covering social feelings (trust, collective nostalgia), social perceptions (nationalism, populist sentiment), and social commitments (national identification, authoritarianism, egalitarianism), we find that participants are much more likely to vote for candidates who signal proximity to their own attitudinal position and less likely for candidates who signal opposing views. The strongest effects were observed for national identification, authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, indicating the importance of commitment to a shared group and to particular principles for distributing power and resources within and between groups. We further demonstrate that social-psychological attitudes are not acting as mere proxies for participants’ past votes or left–right ideology. Our results extend adaptive followership theory to incorporate preferences concerning intragroup coordination and intergroup hierarchy, while highlighting the social-psychological dynamics of political communication that may transcend the concerns of particular election cycles.

Pairwise Comparisons as a Scale Development Tool for Composite Measures

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Composite scales are widely used for measuring aggregate social science concepts. These often consist of linear indices obtained as the weighted sum of a set of relevant indicators. However, selecting coefficients (or weights) that reflect the substantive importance of each indicator towards the concept of interest is a difficult task. We propose a method for the generation of linear indices for aggregate concepts based on pairwise comparisons. Specifically, we ask a group of subject-matter experts to perform a series of pairwise comparisons, with respect to the concept of interest, between profiles displaying different combinations of indicators. This allows us to estimate coefficients for each indicator that provide a linear approximation to how experts make the pairwise evaluations. As we show, the method makes it straightforward to assess intercoder reliability, while being a more accessible task than directly asking experts for coefficients. We demonstrate our method with an application to the concept of ‘productive ageing’, including a cross-cultural comparison of weighting schemes derived from a group of Italian and a group of South Korean experts on this concept.

Measuring Attitudes towards Public Spending using a Multivariate Tax Summary Experiment

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It is difficult to measure public views on tradeoffs between spending priorities because public understanding of existing government spending is limited and the budgetary problem is complicated. We present a new measurement strategy using UK taxpayer summaries as the baseline for a continuous treatment, multivariate choice experiment. The experiment proposes deficit neutral bundles of changes in spending and taxation, allowing us to investigate attitudes towards modifications to the existing budget. We then use a structural choice model to estimate public preferences over 13 spending categories and the taxation level, on average and as a function of respondent attributes. We find that the UK public favours paying more in tax to finance large spending increases across major budget categories; that spending preferences are multidimensional; and that younger people prefer lower levels of taxation and spending than older people. Finally, we report a pre-registered out-of-sample validation of the estimates from the experiment.

Can Citizens Guess How Other Citizens Voted Based on Demographic Characteristics?

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How well do citizens understand the associations between social groups and political divisions in their societies? Previous research has indicated systematic biases in how the demographic composition of party supporters are perceived, but this need not imply that citizens misperceive the likely voting behaviour of specific individuals. We report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles of respondents to the 2017 British Election Study (BES) and then asked to assess either (1) which party that individual was likely to have voted for in the 2017 UK election or (2) whether that individual was likely to have voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership. We find that, despite substantial overconfidence in individual responses, on average citizens’ guesses broadly reflect the actual distribution of groups supporting the parties and referendum positions.

The Emergence of Coherent Political Choices from Incomplete Issue Preferences

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This working paper has been incorporated into our book Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice.

We provide the clearest evidence to date for an ‘issue publics’ account that reconciles conceptions of democracy premised on policy voting with longstanding evidence that citizens typically lack ‘real’, stable opinions on many policy issues. In this account, voters make coherent political choices based on the varying subsets of issues about which they as individuals care and form stable attitudes. Leveraging a novel three-wave panel survey experiment that repeatedly measures British respondents’ issue positions and their political choices between hypothetical candidates taking randomised issue positions, we provide the first direct evidence that higher opinion-stability issues have greater causal effect on citizens’ political choices. We then evidence hitherto untested issue publics implications: even restricted to issue-based considerations and given average issue opinion instability, individuals’ candidate choices are predictable and, when candidates contrast clearly on issues respondents’ care about, highly temporally stable. Aggregate issue opinion instability does not prohibit coherent issue voting.

A Choice-Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey-experimental, choice-based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (i) direct questions eliciting respondents’ positions on different issues with (ii) a conjoint experiment asking respondents to trade-off departures from their preferred positions on those issues. Applying this method to study the relative importance of 34 issues in the UK, we show that British voters attach significant importance to issues like the death penalty which are not presently the subject of political debate and attach more importance to those issues associated with social liberal-conservative rather than economic left-right divisions.

Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems (CATNIP)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

From September 2025 through August 2030, I am the primary investigator for a European Research Council Advanced Grant project Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems (CATNIP). The initial stage of the project will seek to improve how political science measures which problems citizens think are most severe and most in need of their governments’ attention. The resulting advances in measurement will enable later stages of the project which will focus on improving our scientific understanding of where these attitudes come from and how they shape citizens’ views of media and politicians. One important application of this work will be characterising how (and which) voters prioritise international problems versus national problems, and the implications of this for how national political leaders engage internationally on questions of climate change, security, migration, and trade. As the project develops, I will post further details on this page.