Measuring party affiliation
FORS Guide Nº 12
Lutz, G., & Lauener, L. (2020). Measuring party affiliation. FORS Guide No. 12, Version 1.0. Lausanne: Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS). doi:10.24449/FG-2020-00012
Party affiliation is a key concept used in many social science surveys. To measure such affiliations, one can either ask about previous, current or future voting behavior, about party identification or about party proximity. Moreover, there are questions that ask about an evaluation of different parties simultaneously. This guide provides an overview of the different concepts to measure party affiliation, shows examples of their use in Swiss surveys and outlines the implications for researchers who have to choose among them.
Copyright: © the authors 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)