User:Lucasvb/An upgrade to the spatial model of voters: Difference between revisions
User:Lucasvb/An upgrade to the spatial model of voters (view source)
Revision as of 08:50, 7 March 2020
, 4 years agono edit summary
No edit summary |
|||
Line 13:
Now suppose you go around and ask people their opinion regarding many such issues, under those specific framings, and that people answered you honestly and accurately to the best of their knowledge. (We can't really expect more than that, as we can't read people's minds.)
At the very least, we would like to know whether they agree or disagree with the statement. But we could also ask how strongly they feel about that position, how certain they are of it, and how important they feel it is.
One way to convert this into a numerical scale is by considering the following
* '''Belief''': we create a scale from "completely disagree" (-1) to "completely agree" (+1).
* '''Importance''': we create a scale from "completely indifferent" (0%) to "very important" (100%).
We can group
Everyone answering this quiz gets assigned an opinion on every one of these issues.
Line 30:
This kind of model has been used extensively in political polls for decades. The popular website [https://isidewith.com/ I Side With] uses a very similar model.
Of course, there's the problem of how can we treat similar answers as compatible, but that's a much deeper problem. Since this is just a justification of a mathematical model for simulations, we don't really need to worry about it too much.
==== Stances ====
Line 137 ⟶ 139:
* The distance is symmetric and unbiased. It takes the same amount of effort to change one distribution into the other, and vice versa.
:'''Note on terminology''': The name "importance" is mostly motivated by how the width of the distribution results in more willingness to compromise/make sacrifices, and determines a certain "zone of comfort" for the voter. Perhaps "importance" here should be instead interpreted as "certainty", which makes more sense given a "width of belief". Importance could then be included as a third parameter, maybe a scaling factor for each axis, changing the EMD by a factor. But it seems weird to say someone "completely agrees" but is 50% certain of it. Regardless of what we call it, the "width of the distribution" seems like a good approach.
== Comparing stances ==
Line 170 ⟶ 174:
== Benefits & remarks ==
One major benefit of this approach is that we now have a direct way to embed importance into our model of voters, as well as a notion of "fuzziness" to the opinions.
A low-importance opinion is a wider distribution, which means it has a smaller distance to other opinions than a sharp one. So a voter with a low-importance on an issue effectively sees that axis as "compressed", that is, distances are shorter along that axis. On the other hand, if a voter has a high importance on an issue they will perceive differences more aggressively, making them see that axis as "stretched", that is, the distances are perceived as larger.
| |||