Influencing elections with statistics: targeting voters with logistic regression trees

DOI10.1214/13-AOAS648zbMATH Open1454.62505arXiv1311.7326WikidataQ57066591 ScholiaQ57066591MaRDI QIDQ386749FDOQ386749

Authors: Thomas Rusch, Ilro Lee, Kurt Hornik, Wolfgang Jank, Achim Zeileis 

Publication date: 10 December 2013

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: In political campaigning substantial resources are spent on voter mobilization, that is, on identifying and influencing as many people as possible to vote. Campaigns use statistical tools for deciding whom to target ("microtargeting"). In this paper we describe a nonpartisan campaign that aims at increasing overall turnout using the example of the 2004 US presidential election. Based on a real data set of 19,634 eligible voters from Ohio, we introduce a modern statistical framework well suited for carrying out the main tasks of voter targeting in a single sweep: predicting an individual's turnout (or support) likelihood for a particular cause, party or candidate as well as data-driven voter segmentation. Our framework, which we refer to as LORET (for LOgistic REgression Trees), contains standard methods such as logistic regression and classification trees as special cases and allows for a synthesis of both techniques. For our case study, we explore various LORET models with different regressors in the logistic model components and different partitioning variables in the tree components; we analyze them in terms of their predictive accuracy and compare the effect of using the full set of available variables against using only a limited amount of information. We find that augmenting a standard set of variables (such as age and voting history) with additional predictor variables (such as the household composition in terms of party affiliation) clearly improves predictive accuracy. We also find that LORET models based on tree induction beat the unpartitioned models. Furthermore, we illustrate how voter segmentation arises from our framework and discuss the resulting profiles from a targeting point of view.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.7326

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zbMATH Keywords

classification treecampaigningget-out-the-votemicrotargetingmodel treepolitical marketingvoter identificationvoter profilevoter segmentation

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Computational methods for problems pertaining to statistics (62-08) Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects) (62H30) Generalized linear models (logistic models) (62J12) Applications of statistics to social sciences (62P25)

Cites Work

• BART: Bayesian additive regression trees
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• On the existence of maximum likelihood estimates in logistic regression models
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• Logistic model trees
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• Influencing elections with statistics: targeting voters with logistic regression trees
• Attributing effects to a cluster-randomized get-out-the-vote campaign

Cited In (4)

• Forecasting voting behaviour using machine learning -- Poland in transition
• Modeling threshold interaction effects through the logistic classification trunk
• Accounting for political opinions, power, and influence: a voting advice application
• Influencing elections with statistics: targeting voters with logistic regression trees

Uses Software

• R
• ROCR
• rpart
• BayesTree
• mobtools
• ElemStatLearn
• BartPy

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