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Eliciting Beliefs as Distributions in Online Surveys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Lucas Leemann Open the ORCID record for Lucas Leemann [Opens in a new window] ,
Lukas F. Stoetzer  and
Richard Traunmüller
Lucas Leemann*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. Email: leemann@ipz.uzh.ch
Lukas F. Stoetzer
Affiliation:
Humboldt University of Berlin, Cluster of Excellence SCRIPTS, Berlin, Germany. Email: lukas.stoetzer@hu-berlin.de
Richard Traunmüller
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany. Email: traunmueller@uni-mannheim.de
*
Corresponding author Lucas Leemann
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Abstract

Citizens’ beliefs about uncertain events are fundamental variables in many areas of political science. While beliefs are often conceptualized in the form of distributions, obtaining reliable measures in terms of full probability densities is a difficult task. In this letter, we ask if there is an effective way of eliciting beliefs as distributions in the context of online surveys. Relying on experimental evidence, we evaluate the performance of five different elicitation methods designed to capture citizens’ uncertain expectations. Our results suggest that an elicitation method originally proposed by Manski (2009) performs well. It measures average citizens’ subjective belief distributions reliably and is easily implemented in the context of regular (online) surveys. We expect that a wider use of this method will lead to considerable improvements in the study of citizens’ expectations and beliefs.

Keywords

prior elicitationonline survey researchcitizen beliefsmeasurement
Type
Letter
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 541 - 553
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Daniel Hopkins

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