ABSTRACT

In the current era of more extreme political and religious views coming into the mainstream, this paper investigates whether party affiliation is associated with the concept of religious morality more than political ideology. To answer this research question, we construct an empirical scale of religious morality based on data from opinion polls, which remain among the most efficient and widespread survey methods to capture psycho-social data at large scales. Classification models, using ideology and religious morality as predictors, respectively, were compared on their performance in predicting party affiliation. Response data on just four questions from a national opinion poll were used to demonstrate the viability of constructing a parametric scale using item response modeling approaches. Results show that even with ‘small data’, a measurement-based and data-driven approach can produce classification models that are both statistically precise and accurate. Finally, we discuss the findings and the implications for both politics and psycho-social measurement.

摘要

在当前更加极端的政治和宗教观点成为主流的时代，本文探讨了党派是否与宗教道德概念相关，而不是与政治意识形态相关联。为了回答这个研究问题，我们根据民意调查的数据构建了一个宗教道德的经验量表，这仍然是大规模捕获心理社会数据的最有效和最广泛的调查方法之一。分别以意识形态和宗教道德作为预测因子的分类模型在预测党派方面的表现进行了比较。仅使用来自全国民意调查的四个问题的响应数据来证明使用项目响应建模方法构建参数量表的可行性。结果表明，即使是“小数据”，基于测量和数据驱动的方法可以生成统计上精确且准确的分类模型。最后，我们讨论了研究结果以及对政治和心理社会测量的影响。