Replication Data for: Spatial Voting Meets Spatial Policy Positions: An Experimental Appraisal

We develop and validate a novel experimental design that builds a bridge between experimental research on the theory of spatial voting and the literature on measuring policy positions from text. Our design utilizes established text-scaling techniques and their corresponding coding schemes to communicate candidates’ numerical policy positions via verbal policy statements. This design allows researchers to investigate the relationship between candidates’ policy stances and voter choice in a purely text-based context. We validate our approach with an online survey experiment. Our results generalize previous findings in the literature and show that proximity considerations are empirically prevalent in purely text-based issue framing scenarios. The design we develop is broad and portable, and we discuss how it adds to current experimental designs, as well as suggest several implications and possible routes for future research.

本研究开发并验证了一种全新的实验设计，该设计搭建了空间投票理论（spatial voting theory）的实验研究与从文本中测算政策立场的相关学术文献之间的桥梁。本设计依托成熟的文本缩放技术（text-scaling techniques）及其配套编码方案，通过文字政策表述传递候选人的量化政策立场，使研究者能够在纯文本语境下探究候选人政策立场与选民投票选择之间的关联。我们通过在线调查实验（online survey experiment）对本方法进行了有效性验证，研究结果拓展了该领域此前的研究发现，并证实：在纯文本议题框架场景中，立场接近度考量在经验层面普遍存在。本研究所开发的实验设计通用性强且易于移植，本文讨论了其对现有实验研究的补充价值，并提出了若干未来研究的潜在启示与可行路径。