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Using Google Search Data for State Politics Research: An Empirical Validity Test Using Roll-Off Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Shauna Reilly ,
Sean Richey  and
J. Benjamin Taylor
Shauna Reilly*
Affiliation:
Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, USA
Sean Richey
Affiliation:
Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, USA
*
Sean Richey, Georgia State University, 38 Peachtree Ave., Suite 1005, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Google Insights for Search provides a new and rich data source for political scientists, which may be particularly useful for state politics scholars. We outline the prior uses of Google Insights for Search in social and health sciences, explain the data-generating process, and test for the first time the validity of this data for state politics research. Our empirical test of validity shows that Google searches for ballot measures' names and topics in state one week before the 2008 Presidential election correlate with actual participation on those ballot measures. This demonstrates that the more Internet searches there were for a ballot measure, the less likely voters were to rolloff (not answering the question), and establishes the construct validity for this data for one important topic in state politics research. We also outline the limitations to this data source.

Keywords

direct democracyissue preferencesmass mediapolitical communicationvoting behavior
Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 146 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2012

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