When experts disagree: response aggregation and its consequences in expert surveys

Abstract

Political scientists use expert surveys to assess the latent features of political actors. Experts, though, are unlikely to be equally informed and assess all actors equally well. The literature acknowledges variance in measurement quality but pays little attention to the implications of uncertainty for aggregating responses. We discuss the nature of the measurement problem in expert surveys. We then propose methods to assess the ability of experts to judge where actors stand and to aggregate expert responses. We examine the effects of aggregation for a prominent survey in the literature on party politics and EU integration. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we demonstrate that it is better to aggregate expert responses using the median or modal response, rather than the mean.