Mapping Public Opinion: A Tutorial by David Sparks.
From the post:
At the upcoming 2012 summer meeting of the Society of Political Methodology, I will be presenting a poster on Isarithmic Maps of Public Opinion. Since last posting on the topic, I have made major improvements to the code and robustness of the modeling approach, and written a tutorial that illustrates the production of such maps.
This tutorial, in a very rough draft form, can be downloaded here [PDF]. I would welcome any and all comments on clarity, readability, and the method itself. Please feel free to use this code for your own projects, but I would be very interested in seeing any results, and hope you would be willing to share them.
An interesting mapping exercise, even though I find political opinion mapping just a tad tedious. Hasn’t changed significantly in years, which explains “safe” seats for both Republicans and Democrats in the United States.
Still, the techniques are valid and can be useful in other contexts.