Conceptual Measurement

Karl Muth on the importance of measuring the unmeasurable.

Conceptual measurement is enormously important in public policy. Many policy decisions are made on the basis of things that are extraordinarily hard to mathematically estimate – how many other countries will cooperate with us in vanquishing the Somali pirates, do others in my party really like me or are they just pretending in order to get ahead, will these consultants’ estimates of voter turnout really lead to my re-election?

Because empirical measurement of these things is nearly impossible, we must turn to what I call conceptual measurement. Conceptual measurement is not simply qualitative estimation, it is quantification of variables that we believe are highly-correlated not with other empirically-unavailable variables, but with overarching concepts like cooperation, opposition, political ambition, and so on.

In a forthcoming paper, my colleague Prof. DeVelvis and I explore whether the alignment of the several states in the United States in areas like tax policy can be estimated (predicted) by looking at their decisions to honour or not honour permits issued by nearby states. We find there are correlations worthy of further study and exploration. Another paper I’m currently writing looks at whether people of certain political persuasions tend to renounce their American citizenships with unusual frequency (the mainstream media suggests that people across the political spectrum renounce their citizenships when their wealth and tax burdens reach a certain level, but preliminary research suggests strong political trends).

Another conceptual measurement that interests me is exploring the narrowness of political parties. A few weeks ago, at a pub in London not far from the LSE, a colleague commented that political parties in the U.S. and U.K. are more polarising (to voters) and more narrow than ever. I asked what she meant by “narrow” and she suggested that it meant that all candidates standing for national-level, high-profile office adopted such similar policy platforms that all that was left to distinguish the candidates from each other were factors like race (Obama’s mixed race), religion (Romney’s minority religious affiliation), region of origin, and other factors that were almost certainly secondary to their appeal from a functional or utilitarian perspective.

Thinking about this a few days later, I thought of a rather simple, but interesting, quick way to measure this concept of “narrowness” – a conceptual measurement of a party’s policy incestuousness, as it were. The simple test is applied as follows: in a country with primary or runoff elections, a party is narrow where a candidate for office will later appoint a competitor. The output of this test is a retrospective fraction, where the numerator is the number of appointments made and the denominator is the number of serious candidates for office less the incumbent. Hence, Obama’s fraction is 2/7 or 2/? (depending upon how seriously one took the Gravel, Kucinich, or Richardson campaigns of 2008).

The previous paragraph illustrates how this metric is both inexact and interesting. Many of our hardest problems are problems that are inexact. Some are elusive in terms of metrics, some are completely immune to measurement. But these conceptual measurements, these pliable metrics, these relative comparisons are not unimportant. They allow us to look at things that cannot be measured empirically and, at a minimum, quantify how we measure them philosophically.