In political campaigning substantial resources are spent on voter mobilization,
that is, on identifying and influencing as many people as possible
to vote. Campaigns use statistical tools for deciding whom to target ("microtargeting").
In this paper we describe a nonpartisan campaign that aims
at increasing overall turnout using the example of the 2004 US presidential
election. Based on a real data set of 19,634 eligible voters from Ohio, we introduce
a modern statistical framework well suited for carrying out the main
tasks of voter targeting in a single sweep: predicting an individual's turnout
(or support) likelihood for a particular cause, party or candidate as well as
data-driven voter segmentation. Our framework, which we refer to as LORET
(for LOgistic REgression Trees), contains standard methods such as logistic
regression and classification trees as special cases and allows for a synthesis
of both techniques. For our case study, we explore various LORET models
with different regressors in the logistic model components and different partitioning
variables in the tree components; we analyze them in terms of their
predictive accuracy and compare the effect of using the full set of available
variables against using only a limited amount of information. We find that
augmenting a standard set of variables (such as age and voting history) with
additional predictor variables (such as the household composition in terms
of party affiliation) clearly improves predictive accuracy. We also find that
LORET models based on tree induction beat the unpartitioned models. Furthermore,
we illustrate how voter segmentation arises from our framework
and discuss the resulting profiles from a targeting point of view. (authors' abstract)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:3979 |
| Date | 09 1900 |
| Creators | Rusch, Thomas, Lee, Ilro, Hornik, Kurt, Jank, Wolfgang, Zeileis, Achim |
| Publisher | Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf, application/zip, application/pdf |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS648, http://wu.ac.at/methods, http://imstat.org/publications/, http://epub.wu.ac.at/3979/ |
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