Replication Data for Estimating subnational preferences across the European Union

Subnational analyses of political preferences are substantively relevant and offer advantages for causal inference. Yet, our knowledge on regional political preferences across Europe is limited, not least because there is a lack of adequate data. The rich Eurobarometer data is a promising source for European-wide regional information. Yet, it is only representative for the national level. This paper compares state-of-the-art methods for estimating regional preferences from nationally representative Eurobarometer data, validating predictions with regionally representative surveys. Our analysis highlights a number of challenges for estimating regional preferences across Europe, such as data availability, variable selection, and over-fitting. We find that predictions are best using a Bayesian additive regression tree with synthetic post-stratification.

对政治偏好开展次国家级分析兼具实质研究价值与因果推断优势。然而，当前学界对欧洲全域各地区政治偏好的认知仍较为有限，这在很大程度上源于缺乏足够的适配数据。内容丰富的欧洲晴雨表（Eurobarometer）数据是获取全欧地区级信息的极具潜力的来源，但该数据仅具备国家级层面的代表性。本文针对基于全国代表性欧洲晴雨表数据估算地区政治偏好的前沿方法展开对比研究，并通过地区代表性调查对预测结果进行验证。本研究揭示了欧洲地区政治偏好估算面临的多项挑战，包括数据可得性、变量选择与过拟合问题。研究结果表明，结合合成后分层的贝叶斯加性回归树（Bayesian Additive Regression Tree）模型可取得最优预测效果。