A Method for the Estimation of Voter Transition Rates.

Recent advances in the field of ecological inference have provided researchers with new tools to estimate voter transition rates in two-party systems, based on contingency tables. Although some researchers have moved from the 2×2 case to the broader R×C ecological inference problem, voter transition estimation remains a difficult and tedious goal. As a result, scholars of multiparty systems still struggle with their data. In this paper we follow a new approach and we propose a new method that deals with this issue. Using two data sets, one from the French presidential elections in 2007 (first and second round) and one from the Greek parliamentary elections (2004 and 2007), we demonstrate that the proposed method provides good estimates of voter transition rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]