Reported vote: An observational measure of political stigma

Abstract

Abstract How can one measure the influence of social norms using observational data? This chapter argues that whenever one can find variation in the publicness of a given political behavior, one can compare its prevalence across more private and more public settings. The gap provides a measure of the strength of social norms for or against that behavior. In an application of this logic, a measure of political stigma is proposed, called reported vote. Reported vote captures the proportion of the official vote for a party that is declared in post-electoral surveys. If there is a strong social norm against supporting a party, even individuals who voted for it have an incentive not to admit that they did so. A number of validation tests are presented for reported vote as a measure of political stigma. The chapter discusses how the logic underlying this variable can be used to construct other measures.