Comparative Politics on Diogo Ferrari

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 23:18:51 -0300

Support for Right-wing Populism in Comparative Perspective

Populism has become a central piece of the political landscape in recent years. It has drawn the attention of scholars, pundits, and the news media alike. So much so that “populism” was declared the Word of the Year in 2017 by the Cambridge Dictionary. The increasing electoral support of populist leaders disquieted scholars and political specialists due to the threat it represents to democracy. In Europe, the rise of far-right populist leaders has some disturbing similarities to previous reactionary populist movements of the first half of the 20th Century, which led to tragic outcomes and two world wars. While specialists argue that populists can revitalize democracy when they are in opposition due to populists’ attack on the political elite insulation, scholars also have alerted to the danger that populists represent to liberal democracy when they occupy positions of power. When elected, populist leaders tend to weaken checks and balances and undermine the separation of power, claiming that the political institutions are dysfunctional and a barrier to the “will of the people.” They also threaten democratic inclusiveness because they are less likely to make compromises, and their rhetoric stigmatizes some minority groups that don’t belong to “the people” they claim to represent, often composed of white nationals born population.

Because of the rise of electoral support for populists around the world and the threat they represent to liberal democracy and inclusiveness when in power, it is crucial to understand the causes of popular support for populist leaders and investigate if their anti-establishment and “otherizing” rhetoric matters for their electoral success.

This project seeks to disentangle seeks to disentangle how much the popular appeal of right-wing populist leaders is explained by voters’ partisanship, populists attack on the current political institutions and their anti-elitist and anti-establishment positions, which give them the epithet “populists,” or populists right-wing, often far-right, conservative, and otherizing ideology, which give them the label “right-wing.”

Publications:

Ferrari, D. (2022) The Effect of Party Identification and Party Cues on Populist Attitudes. Research & Politics.
Ferrari, D. (2022) Ideology, Populist Attitudes, and Vote for Right-wing Populists (working paper)

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 23:18:51 -0300

Modeling Latent Effect Heterogeneity

The goal of this project is to provide a series of tools to investigate latent heterogeneity in the effect of treatment variables or other observed covariates. Latent heterogeneity can occur because latent conditioning terms (i.e., interactive factors) are omitted in the empirical analysis.

In generalized linear models, omitting interactions can lead to latent occurrences of Simpson’s Paradox, which is a long-standing problem in statistical analysis in general and in the social sciences in particular. Simpson’s paradox refers to the possibility that an effect found when data are aggregated is entirely different or even reversed when data are separated and analyzed in groups. There are modeling solutions when the groups are known and their causal role is known (Pearl, 2011). But if the groups are latent, classical empirical approaches (GLM, mixed models, etc.) are not able to detect and deal with them, meaning that latent heterogeneity or Simpson’s Paradox occurrence can go unnoticed by the researcher. In practice, it means that a researcher can conclude that an effect is positive when, in fact, it is positive only for a subgroup of the population but negative for other subgroups.

In comparative analysis, there is another level of complication: different countries can have different latent factors conditioning different observed covariates. This problem is not new, and many researchers have recognized its importance and its implications for both observational and experimental studies (see, for instance, Adam Przeworski, 2007). It is impossible for researchers to know a priori if interactions or group heterogeneity are omitted. Suzan Stokes (2014), using different terms, argues that the omnipresent possibility of omitting relevant interactions in the analysis is a source of an attitude of radical skepticism regarding the results of observational and experimental empirical investigation in the social sciences. She says:

But from the standpoint of the radical skeptic, no research design can dispose of all potential interactions. Setting plausibility aside, if units have high dimensionality and if some confounders are unmeasurable, some unobserved trait is always likely to interact with the treatment. Faced with an experimental study that uncovers a causal effect, the radical skeptic should posit some unspecified subset of units whose response to treatment is at odds with the average response, potentially changing the theoretical implications of the study’s findings. If interactions can change the interpretation of experimental results, then the radical skeptic should be unnerved by their implication for experimental research. Because one can test only for interactions between treatments and observed factors, ungrounded skepticism implies that we will remain in the dark regarding the real findings of experimental studies.

Unobserved interactions [...] are omnipresent and inevitably limit the contribution of research to knowledge (Stokes, 2014, pg. 46)

This project develops machine learning approaches and semi-parametric Bayesian (SPB) methods for dealing with those issues and investigating if interactions were omitted.

In the paper “Modeling Context-Dependent Latent Effect Heterogeneity,” published in Political Analysis, I propose a hierarchical Dirichlet mixture of generalized linear models to deal with that problem. Using the model, researchers don’t need to specify all interactions explicitly. The model estimates marginal effects, even though interactions are missing in the model specification. Moreover, contrary to previous approaches, the method allows researchers to investigate whether contextual features such as schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, and country-specific institutional settings are associated with the emergence of latent heterogeneity in the effect of observables. I illustrate the model’s contributions with applications in political science that investigate attitudes toward financial aid and the effect of inequality on beliefs about meritocracy. The method is implemented in R, and it is available in the R package Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Generalized Linear Models (hdpGLM).

I have used SPB models to study the latent structure of public support for welfare policies in OECD countries. I show that there is a hidden polarization among the observed socioeconomic groups in some countries but not others. My research indicates that one side effect of welfare policies in highly unequal societies with fragmented party systems is the existence of latent polarization in welfare policy preferences among individuals with similar observed socioeconomic characteristics. Countries that have comparatively smaller welfare states (the USA, Japan, Australia, New Zealand) do not display such a latent polarization.

Publications:

(2019) Modeling Context-Dependent Latent Effect Heterogeneity Political Analysis
Measuring Public Polarization and its Connection to the Determinants of Political Preferences
Identification Analysis and Multimodality of Posterior Distribution in Bayesian Models.

References

Pearl, J. (2011). Simpson’s Paradox:An Anatomy.
Przeworski, A., Is the science of comparative politics possible? , In C. B. Boix, & S. C. Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (pp. ) (2007). : Oxford Handbooks Online.
Stokes, S. C., A defense of observational research, In D. L. Teele (Eds.), Field experiments and their critics: Essays on the uses and abuses of experimentation in the social sciences (pp. 33–57) (2014). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Tue, 11 Jun 2019 23:27:44 -0300

Information, Income Distribution, and Policy Preferences

Classical theories about public preferences for the allocation of political authority in multilevel polities emphasize the role of economic conditions, identity, and nationalist/regionalist values. In developed nations, immigration has played a significant role in public attitudes about supra-national integration.

This project seeks to understand how information about inequality and income distribution affect political attitudes about welfare policies and political integration. How do different social groups process information about inequality? How does that information change their perception about their social and political environment? How do perceptions affect political attitudes and ideological positions?

As a part of this project, I have conducted a nation-wide survey experiment in 2018-2019 in Brazil with other collaborators to investigate the reaction of various groups to different types of information about the distribution of income and inequality. Preliminary results show that people, particularly from the middle class, tend to act as if demand for redistribution led to an increase in welfare state efforts. So, information about the distribution of income make people adjust their belief about the demand for redistribution and, as a consequence, strengthen their support (opposition) to redistributive policies and parties with redistributive programs.

Not only that. Information about state-level demand for redistribution makes high-income groups more centralist (favor centralization of political authority). Poor population, on the other hand, support more decentralization when they receive the same information. An interesting finding is that the effect of information is stronger among the white population because this population perceive that they and, therefore, other groups as well, can influence political decisions. On the other hand, the attitudes of non-white population, who feel marginalized from the political process, are less affected by information about inequality and demand for welfare policies.

Some related working papers:

Public Policy Preferences, Redistribution, and Support for Welfare Integration in Multilevel Polities: a Survey Experiment in Brazil