Abstract
There has been great interest in the Southern Illinois mine war by historians. An explanation has been that this war was caused by miners who had radical political beliefs. We examine this view by applying four methods of ecological inference to estimate the proportion of coal miners who were socialist voters in this time period. Based on these results (especially considering the assumptions of the methods) we conclude that miners were politically less radical than previously thought.
Highlights
It is often the case in historical research that data needed for a particular study were never recorded
The purpose of the present study is to examine exactly how politically radical the miners were by using ecological inference methods to look at the strength of miners support of Socialist candidates in southern Illinois
We are primarily interested in p which is, in our example, the fraction of coal miners that were socialist voters in each county
Summary
It is often the case in historical research that data needed for a particular study were never recorded. If such data are cell frequencies from a contingency table, and the marginal frequencies were recorded, under some conditions, it may be possible to recover the cell frequencies. Such a procedure goes under the heading of ecological inference even though that term is more general. We stress that the assumptions are critical If they are not met it is not possible to recover the cell frequencies. Desired contingency table cell frequencies will be recovered from the aggregate data
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