Dr. Giurcanu participated in the last SAPOR conference, which is the southern chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), in Raleigh, NC (Oct 5-6, 2017), where she delivered a paper titled:”Europe under Duress: Assessing Uncertainty in Vote Choice in European Parliament Elections as an Entropy Measure”.
Her “paper examines voting behavior in the 2009 European Parliament elections in 27 member states of the European Union. The project joins the debate of when and how do attitudes towards the European integration affect vote choice from a methodological perspective by introducing an entropy measure of voters’ uncertainty when evaluating party positions on EU integration and the left-right ideological dimensions. The project shows that parties display larger uncertainties on the EU dimension than on the LR dimension. Furthermore, there is a significant regional difference within the EU: parties in the post-communist countries (East) display larger uncertainties on both dimensions compared to parties in the western countries (West). However, a party’s ambiguous position is not necessarily detrimental to the party since our analyses show that voters prefer clear position on the left-right dimension in both East and Western states, but do not punish parties that are vague on the European integration dimension in the Western states only. The paper points to the importance of bringing back discussions of parties’ vague messages when utilizing spatial models across heterogeneous contexts.”
