Explaining what voters try to hide
Politics is full of surveys purporting to explain why voters act the way they do. But how can we really pinpoint the factors that explain what happens inside the voting booth? A new paper co-authored by an MIT political scientist suggests that a polling method known as “conjoint analysis” can get traction on political questions that are hard for traditional surveys to assess accurately. Suppose you are analyzing a campaign pitting two candidates who vary in several personal attributes — such as religion, ethnicity, or gender — and who have different positions on several issues. One way of conducting traditional polling would be to ask voters how important they consider those factors to be. While informative, the results — where voters describe factors as “somewhat important,” “very important,” and so on — can also be a bit vague. Conjoint analysis takes this a step further by polling voters about hypothetical matchups between candidates....