Ron Johnston, Thomas Gschwend, Charles Pattie
On Estimates of Split-Ticket Voting: EI and EMax

SFB 504 discussion paper
04-40 S.
,
Mannheim
,
2004

Cho and Gaines have recently criticized work by Burden and Kimball on split-ticket voting in the USA, suggesting that their estimates of the volume of such voting (derived using King's EI method) across Congressional Districts and States are unreliable. Using part of the Burden-Kimball data set, we report on a parallel set of estimates generated by a different procedure (EMax), which employs three rather than two sets of bounds. The results are extremely similar to Burden and Kimball's, providing strong circumstantial evidence for their conclusions regarding the impact of campaign spending and other influences on the volume of split-ticket voting.