Ecological regression is a statistical technique which runs regression on aggregates, often used in political science and history to estimate group voting behavior from aggregate data.
For example, if counties have a known Democratic vote (in percentage) D, and a known percentage of Catholics, C, then running a linear regression of dependent variable D against independent variable C will give D = a + bC. If the regression gives D = .22 + .45C for example, then the estimated Catholic vote (C = 1) is 67% Democratic and the non-Catholic vote (C = 0) is 22% Democratic. The technique has been often used in litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to see how blacks and whites voted.
See also
Further reading
- Brown, Philip J.; Payne, Clive D. (1986). "Aggregate Data, Ecological Regression, and Voting Transitions". Journal of the American Statistical Association. 81 (394): 452–460. doi:10.1080/01621459.1986.10478290. JSTOR 2289235. advanced techniques
- King, Gary; Martin Abba Tanner; Ori Rosen (2004). Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521542807.
- Kousser, J. Morgan (1973). "Ecological Regression and the Analysis of past Politics" (PDF). Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 4 (2): 237–262. doi:10.2307/202265. JSTOR 202265. with guide to the literature
References
Gelman, Andrew; Park, David K.; Ansolabehere, Stephen; Price, Phillip N.; Minnite, Lorraine C. (2001). "Models, assumptions and model checking in ecological regressions" (PDF). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society). 164 (1): 101–118. doi:10.1111/1467-985x.00190. ISSN 0964-1998. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/ecological.pdf ↩
Jacob S. Siegel (2002). Applied Demography: Applications to Business, Government, Law and Public Policy. Emerald Group. p. 557. ISBN 9780126418408. 9780126418408 ↩