Hard Choices, Easy Answers:
Values, Information, and American Public Opinion

R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm

Book Description

Appendices [all in .PDF format]

A Roadmap of the Technical Appendices

This document provides the technical appendices for our book, Hard Choices, Easy Answers (2002). These supplemental materials give details of the statistical methodologies that we use in our research, indepth discussions of the empirical analyses in each chapter of our book, and present estimation results that form the basis for the conclusions reached in each chapter.

These appendices serve as an electronic supplement to our book. As such, they will remain as published, and will continue to be available here. Additional materials, including statistical software code for our statistical work and some replication datasets, can be found at http://hardchoices.caltech.edu. This website will evolve as we determine which extra materials are useful for readers of our book.

There are seven appendices, referenced A-G. They can be viewed or downloaded as a single .PDF file here or individually as separate files by following the links below. The materials they contain are as follows:

Appendix A: Methodological Materials for Chapter 3. This appendix provides a basic primer for multivariate statistical models, and a basic derivation of binary and ordinal choice models.

Appendix B: Models for Heterogeneous Choices. This appendix follows directly from appendix A, as we present the basic derivations for the heteroskedastic models that are the primary statistical tool used in our research.

Appendix C: Methodological Materials for Chapter 5. Here are tables of model estimates for the abortion, euthanasia, and suicide results discussed in chapter 5.

Appendix D: Methodological Materials for Chapter 6. In this appendix we provide details about the racial attitudes analyses in chapter 6, including tables of parameter estimates.

Appendix E: Methodological Materials for Chapter 7. This appendix gives tables of parameter estimates for the Internal Revenue Service analysis.

Appendix F: Methodological Materials for Chapter 8. Here we discuss the ordered heteroskedastic logit model, and the aggregate model derived from it. We also present in this appendix model parameter estimates that form the basis for the secondary analyses discussed in chapter 8.

Appendix G: Methodological Materials for Chapter 9. This last appendix gives parameter estimates for the analysis discussed in chapter 9.

References. We conclude this document with a list of references cited in these appendices.

Authors:
R. Michael Alvarez
Professor of Political Science
California Institute of Technology
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
M/C 228-77
1200 E. California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91125
email: rma@hss.caltech.edu

John Brehm
Professor and Chair of Political Science
Department of Political Science
University of Chicago
502 Pick Hall
5828 S. University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
email: jjbrehm@uchicago.edu

Princeton University Press (2002)
Princeton, NJ

File created: 5/15/02

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Princeton University Press