1Analyzing electoral utilities (PTV’s) in the EES’s

2PTV question text We have a number of parties in <country> each of which would like to get your vote. How probable is it that you will ever vote for the following parties? Please specify your views on a 10-point-scale where 1 means "not at all probable " and 10 means "very probable". You may use any number between 1 and 10 to specify your views. If you think of Party 1: what mark out of ten best describes how probable it is that you will ever vote for Party 1? And what mark out of ten best describes how probable it is that you will ever vote for Party 2? And for Party 3, etc. These are known as the Propensity To Vote (PTV) questions. 3Some uses of PTV’s in electoral studies (more detailed discussion in van der Eijk et al, 2006) Description of: support base of political parties, particularly useful when studying small political parties party competition: the extent to which the basis of electoral support for different parties overlaps voter variables: the extent to which an individual voter is ‘torn ’ between different parties, subject to competition These descriptions can be obtained by appropriate data-manipulation commands in statpacks, or by are provided by a STATA routine called utilstat (available on EES website) As dependent variable replacing party choice in comparative analyses, thus overcoming problems of incomparability between party systems. 4Support base of political parties Aggregating over respondents provides an estimate of the support base for a party This requires an aggregation rule in the form of summation after recoding of PTV-scores, e.g.