Pacheco Publishes Evaluation of Policy Mood Measures in the States
A recent study co-authored by Julianna Pacheco, director of the Politics and Policy Research Program, explores the varying approaches to measuring public preference throughout the states. The researchers provide a background on how scholars have conceptualized and measured policy mood among the mass public in the past and the implications of those choices for both theoretical and empirical questions in state politics.
In the study, the researchers looked at several methods for measuring public opinion, including simulation-based approaches, disaggregation of survey data, proxy measures, and modeling and/or poststratification of national surveys. The study is framed around two questions: (1) what is the concept to be measured? and (2) how does the concept fit with the research question?