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Should we include margins of error in public opinion polls?
Abstract
Public opinion polls have become vital and increasingly visible parts of election campaigns. Previous research has frequently demonstrated that polls can influence both citizens' voting intentions and political parties' campaign strategies. However, they are also fraught with uncertainty. Margins of error can reflect (parts of) this uncertainty. This paper investigates how citizens' voting intentions change due to whether polling estimates are presented with or without margins of error.
Using a vignette experiment (N=3224), we examine this question based on a real‐world example in which different election polls were shown to nationally representative respondents ahead of the 2021 federal election in Germany. We manipulated the display of the margins of error, the interpretation of polls and the closeness of the electoral race.
The results indicate that margins of error can influence citizens' voting intentions. This effect is dependent on the actual closeness of the race and additional interpretative guidance provided to voters. More concretely, the results consistently show that margins of error increase citizens' inclination to vote for one of the two largest contesting parties if the polling gap between these parties is small, and an interpretation underlines this closeness.
The findings of this study are important for three reasons. First, they help to determine whether margins of error can assist citizens in making more informed (strategic) vote decisions. They shed light on whether depicting opinion‐poll uncertainty affects the key features of representative democracy, such as democratic accountability. Second, the results stress the responsibility of the media. The way polls are interpreted and contextualized influences the effect of margins of error on voting behaviour. Third, the findings of this paper underscore the significance of including methodological details when communicating scientific research findings to the broader public.
... Online public opinion has gained wide attention not only in the policy-making process of governmental departments (Li, 2021;Awad et al., 2020), but also in optimizing strategic decisions of enterprises in various industries (Fortin and Cimon-Morin, 2023;Rogowski, 2023;Krause and Gahn, 2023). Due to the diversity of participants in public opinion discussion and the complexity of information dissemination channels, an efficient identification of netizens' features becomes one of the key factors to manage public opinion (Ma et al., 2023). ...
The development of various digital social network platforms has caused public opinion to play an increasingly important role in the policy making process. However, due to the fact that public opinion hotspots usually change rapidly (such as the phenomenon of public opinion inversion), both the behaviour feature and demand feature of netizens included in the public opinion often vary over time. Therefore, this paper focuses on the feature identification problem of public opinion simultaneously considering the multiple observation time intervals and key time points, in order to support the management of policy-focused online public opinion. According to the variable-scale data analysis theory, the temporal scale space model is established to describe candidate temporal observation scales, which are organized following the time points of relevant policy promulgation (policy time points). After proposing the multi-scale temporal data model, a temporal variable-scale clustering method (T-VSC) is put forward. Compared to the traditional numerical variable-scale clustering method, the proposed T-VSC enables to combine the subjective attention of decision-makers and objective timeliness of public opinion data together during the scale transformation process. The case study collects 48552 raw public opinion data on the double-reduction education policy from Sina Weibo platform during Jan 2023 to Nov 2023. Experimental results indicate that the proposed T-VSC method could divide netizens that participate in the dissemination of policy-focused public opinion into clusters with low behavioural granularity deviation on the satisfied observation time scales, and identify the differentiated demand feature of each netizen cluster at policy time points, which could be applied to build the timely and efficient digital public dialogue mechanism.
This chapter asks how electoral competition changed from 2013 to 2017 in East and West Germany. Following Sartori’s understanding of party systems as systems of interactions resulting from inter-party competition, it focuses on the content-related properties of the German party system. Combining data from the GLES 2013 and 2017 voter and candidate surveys, it investigates, first, the extent of electoral competition in terms of overlapping electoral support of party pairs and, second, how the establishment of the AfD changed the substantial structure underlying electoral competition in East and West Germany. Findings suggest that electoral competition in Germany is best described as three-dimensional. Whereas regional differences result from different voter preferences regarding policy issues, temporal differences are essentially the result of the changing relevance of the socio-economic and socio-cultural issue dimensions but also a newly emerged populist–pluralist divide.
Policy in coalition governments (a) depends on negotiations between parties that (b) continue between elections. No extant means of predicting policy—bargaining power indices, vote shares, seat shares, polling, veto players or measures of electoral competitiveness—recognizes both of these facts. We conceptualize, estimate and validate the first dynamic measure of parties’ bargaining leverage intended to predict policy and politics. We argue that those parties with the greatest leverage in policy negotiations are those with the highest probability of participating in an alternative government, were one to form. Combining a large set of political polls and an empirical coalition formation model developed with out-of-sample testing, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 21 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. Applications to government spending and to the stringency of environmental policy show leverage from coalition inclusion probabilities to be strongly predictive while the primary alternatives—vote shares, seat shares and polls—are not.
After news media and pollsters were unsuccessful in predicting recent political outcomes such as the 2016 U.S. election, opinion polls came under scrutiny. Journalists were accused of not providing audiences the tools to correctly interpret poll information. Using a content analysis of all evening news items from CBS, ABC, and NBC from the final two months before the 2020 U.S. general election, we analyzed the quality of poll coverage. We find that half of the references to election polls are “diffuse,” in which journalists refer to “the polls” in a general manner. When news items do cover specific poll results, media often disclose the absolute minimal essential information (e.g., population and error margin), but fail to provide additional methodological details.
Forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic entails a great deal of uncertainty. The same way that we would like electoral forecasters to systematically include their confidence intervals to account for such uncertainty, we assume that COVID-19-related forecasts should follow that norm. Based on literature on negative bias, we may expect the presence of uncertainty to affect citizens’ attitudes and behaviours, which would in turn have major implications on how we should present these sensitive forecasts. In this research we present the main findings of a survey experiment where citizens were exposed to a projection of the total number of deaths. We manipulated the exclusion (and inclusion) of graphically depicted confidence intervals in order to isolate the average causal effect of uncertainty. Our results show that accounting for uncertainty does not change (1) citizens’ perceptions of projections’ reliability, nor does it affect (2) their support for preventive public health measures. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.
Electoral competition is a cornerstone of representative democracies. However, measuring its extent and intensity constitutes a challenging task for the discipline. Based on multilevel conceptualizations, we discuss three different measures of political competition (electoral volatility, vote switching, and voters’ availability) and their relation to each other. We argue that electoral volatility and vote switching as indicators of electoral competitiveness tend to misestimate the degree of competition in multiparty systems. As an alternative, we propose focusing on the individual’s propensity to vote for different parties, i.e. electoral availability. Using data provided by the European Election Studies, we compare availability to electoral volatility and vote switching in the framework of necessary and sufficient conditions. Our regression results show that operationalizing electoral competitiveness based on voter availability – which is increasingly retrievable from cross-national voter surveys – helps to avoid type-II errors, i.e. identifying competitive elections as less or non-competitive.
Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems.
The growing importance of polls in news coverage raises questions about whether legislators should regulate polls in election campaigns. Although restrictions are on the rise, little is known about some basic but important facts regarding polls. Who reads polls? Are citizens who are aware of polls more likely to change their voting behaviour? And do polls help them to better anticipate electoral outcomes? We answer these questions using data from the 2015 Canadian election. We show that being exposed to polls is not associated with voter’s likelihood of changing their vote choice compared with their vote intention during the campaign, does not affect the propensity to turn out or abstain, but does improve their ability to forecast the winner. We conclude that polls are more helpful than harmful.
We offer a dynamic Bayesian forecasting model for multiparty elections. It combines data from published pre-election public opinion polls with information from fundamentals-based forecasting models. The model takes care of the multiparty nature of the setting and allows making statements about the probability of other quantities of interest, such as the probability of a plurality of votes for a party or the majority for certain coalitions in parliament. We present results from two ex ante forecasts of elections that took place in 2017 and are able to show that the model outperforms fundamentals-based forecasting models in terms of accuracy and the calibration of uncertainty. Provided that historical and current polling data are available, the model can be applied to any multiparty setting.
Are election polling misses becoming more prevalent? Are they more likely in some contexts than others? In this paper we undertake an over-time and cross-national assessment of prediction errors in pre-election polls. Our analysis draws on more than 26,000 polls from 338 elections in 45 countries over the period between 1942 and 2013, as well as data on more recent elections from 2014 to 2016. We proceed in the following way. First, building on previous studies, we demonstrate how poll errors evolve in a structured way over the election timeline. Second, we then focus on errors in polls in the final week of the campaign to examine poll performance across election years. Third, we use the historical performance of polls to benchmark recent polling “misses” in the UK, US and elsewhere. Fourth, we undertake a pooled analysis of polling errors – controlling for a number of institutional and party features – which enables us to test whether poll errors have increased or decreased over time. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, recent performance of polls has not been outside the ordinary. The performance of polls does vary across political contexts, however, in understandable ways.
One of the key democratic functions of the media is to provide people with the kind of information they need to be free and self-governing. This is equally important when it comes to the coverage of opinion polls. Thus far, there is however only limited research on the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, including factors that might help to explain variation in the quality of opinion poll coverage. Against this background, the purpose of this study is (1) to investigate the extent to which news media take statistical uncertainties into account when covering opinion polls and making causal interpretations based on opinion polls, and (2) to explore some factors that might help to explain variation in the quality of opinion poll coverage. Among other things, the results show that journalists very often fail to take statistical uncertainties into account and that they, in about half of the cases, provide explanations for changes that are within the margin of error. The results also show that the quality of opinion poll coverage varies between different types of media organizations and between election campaigns and off-election periods.
The common wisdom in the literature is that citizens cast their vote based on party characteristics. Such âparty-centeredâ voting behavior would imply that voters do not consider potential coalitions. In practice, we often observe parties sending coalition signals during election campaigns. If it is true that voters do not care about these coalitions, why would parties send signal in the first place? So far very little is know about how such coalition signals work. We present a simple model that incorporates coalition signals into a voterâs individual decision-making process. We argue that coalition signals have an indirect effect on voting. They increase the importance of coalition characteristics in voterâs decision calculus. In order to test this expectation we employ a unique survey-experiment conducted in the Austrian election study of 2006. Preliminary results support our expectation.
This study investigates the role of emotions in the (bandwagon) effect of opinion polls on vote choice. It combines a media content analysis of poll reporting (N = 2,772) on an individual basis with a two wave panel survey (N = 1,064) during the 2013 German Bundestag election campaign. Results show that anxiety and enthusiasm mediate the effect of poll exposure on vote choice. Furthermore, the effect of polls on vote choice is found to be a consequence of how these polls are presented in the media. Polls are more than neutral interim campaign statistics, as they influence vote choice, and do so partly because of the emotions they evoke.
Many nations ban the release of pre-election poll results based on the assumption that voters will be adversely influenced by poll information. The AAPOR notes that there is no scientific evidence that voter decisions are influenced by media polls. This study uses survey experiments to assess if respondents might be influenced by a hypothetical candidate’s poll standing. It advances our understanding of poll effects by testing which type of people might be most responsive to information about poll standing. Results are consistent with a theory proposing that voters with weaker political preferences (those less politically engaged) may be more likely to support candidates who are leading in media polls. Although the experimental effects are substantial for some of the less politically engaged respondents, these people may be least likely to become aware of media poll information in a real world setting. The effect of poll information on candidate choices is likely to be limited for the electorate overall.
Information about the support given by the public opinion to political actors has become a constant element of the public debate in Poland after the fall of Communism. Very soon polls became an argument in debates, a premise, or a way to justify decisions. At the same time they were criticized both by politicians and journalists convinced that polls can significantly influence the election results. But the fact was not noticed in Poland that all debates about the influence of polls on election outcomes should be preceded by a discussion of the way they are presented in the media. The present article joins this debate by subjecting to analysis the polls published in the Polish press during parliamentary campaigns in the dimensions of the role they played during the recent several years, the quality of methodological information, and of the way the polls were used in the media.
As opposed to European and American analyses, no improvement in the conformity to standards of minimal disclosure in newspapers’ reporting of public opinion polls was noticed, although—like in other countries—a dramatic increase in the number of polls reported was observed.
This article explores the impact of strategy-based campaign coverage on turnout and confidence in government. Recent theoretical advances suggest that variables such as sophistication and involvement frequently moderate media exposure effects. We hypothesize that the impact of strategy frames will be moderated by political involvement and sophistication. In an experiment, we precisely isolate and manipulate particular story elements that have been said to foster public cynicism: the strategic interpretation of candidate motives, the presence of polling results, and the use of war or game metaphors to describe the campaign. Relative to the issue-oriented coverage, strategy frames boost the number of strategy-based comments people offer when describing the campaign and depress issue-based commentary. As expected, framing effects on turnout, trust in government, civic duty, and the perceived meaningfulness of elections are moderated by involvement and sophistication. Nonpartisans and those with less than a college degree are significantly demobilized and alienated by strategy-based coverage, while partisans and the highly educated are mostly unaffected.
This study investigated the effects of strategic television news coverage of a routine political issue in a nonelectoral context on political cynicism, issue evaluation, and policy support. An experimentally manipulated television news story about the en- largement of the European Union was produced in a strategy version and an is- sue-framed version, which were embedded in an experimental bulletin of a national news program. Results showed that exposure to strategic news fuelled political cyni- cism and activated negative associations with the enlargement issue. Politically knowledgeable participants displayed higher levels of cynicism and were more nega- tive in their evaluation. Strategic news did not suppress policy support. A 2-wave ex- perimental design with a second posttest was employed to test the longevity of effects. The effects of exposure to strategic news on political cynicism muted between the im- mediate and delayed posttest. These findings suggest that effects may not persist un- less participants are exposed to additional news framed in a similar way. News is the key source of information about politics and the economy for a major- ity of citizens in Western democracies. Previous studies of the impact of news on public perceptions of and engagement in politics have produced mixed results. These studies are characterized by a number of features, such as a strong focus on American politics during elections and often-assumed long-term effects on demo-
Using data from Italian municipal elections from 1993 to 2011, we investigate whether political competition affects electoral turnout. Taking advantage of the dual ballot system adopted for municipalities with more than 15,000 inhabitants, we measure the expected closeness in the second round through the first round electoral results. Thanks to the richness of our dataset we are able to distinguish between valid, blank and invalid ballots and to investigate the effect of closeness on each of these variables, controlling for municipalities’ and candidates’ characteristics and for municipal fixed effects. We also estimate a Heckman selection model to take into account for the non-randomly selected sample. It emerges that closeness strongly increases valid ballots and reduces blank ballots supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in closer competitions. The effect is much higher in magnitude than that merging when measuring closeness with ex-post electoral results, suggesting a quite relevant endogeneity bias. On the other hand, we do not find any statistically significant effect on invalid ballots.
With the announced end of Angela Merkel’s tenure as Chancellor, the 2021 German federal election was particularly charged. In stark contrast to the Social Democratic Party, which became more united as the election approached, the Christian Democrats were not able to consolidate the fissures unveiled by Merkel’s departure. The Greens, emboldened by the polls, for the first time joined the traditional major parties in nominating a chancellor candidate. The result was a campaign period that centred heavily on the three-way race between Olaf Scholz (SPD), Armin Laschet (CDU/CSU) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens). The electoral outcome reduced the large number of coalitions discussed against the backdrop of a fragmenting party system and eventually led to a novel partnership on the federal level, a so-called traffic light coalition between the Social Democrats, Greens, and the Liberals. The formation of this coalition was facilitated by the refusal of Social and Christian Democrats to even consider renewing their ‘grand’ coalition, a newfound self-confidence on behalf of Greens and Liberals as well as the symbolic benefit that this novel alliance brought together the election winners. In many ways, the electoral result and the coalition it engendered represent new beginnings in German politics but significant hurdles to the consolidation of these patterns remain.
Public opinion polls have become increasingly prominent during elections, but how they affect voting behaviour remains uncertain. In this work, we estimate the effects of poll exposure using an experimental design in which we randomly assign the availability of polls to participants in simulated election campaigns. We draw upon results from ten independent experiments conducted across six countries on four continents (Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to examine how polls affect the amount of information individuals seek and the votes that they cast. We further assess how poll effects differ according to individual-level factors, such as partisanship and political sophistication, and the content included in polls and how it is presented. Our work provides a comprehensive assessment of the power of polls and the implications for poll reporting in contemporary elections.
This article examines the media coverage of vote intention polls in the Netherlands. We assess whether the quality of media reporting on polls depends on the availability of information regarding the quality in pollster’s reports. Our analysis of the quality looks at three different quality measures: (1) mentioning WAPOR items, such as field dates, sampling method, and polling method, (2) mentioning the margin of error, and (3) the correct interpretation of (in)significant changes and differences. The Netherlands provides an interesting case, because there is variation over time and across pollsters in the way they report their polls as well as the increased popularity of a polling aggregator. Our findings indicate that the overall quality of Dutch coverage of polls is low. When a pollster mentions the margin of error in its report, media reports on that poll are more likely to include this information and to correctly interpret the significance of differences between two parties. This effect is particularly visible when the pollster provides uncertainty intervals in its headline figures.
Can voters in multi-party systems predict which coalition will form the government with any degree of accuracy? To date, studies which explore voter expectations of coalition formation have emphasized individual level attributes, such as education, but the context of information that voters experience at the time the coalitions are forming should also be consequential in enabling (or handicapping) voters in forming expectations. We examine the relative effects of individual level attributes (e.g. education, cognitive mobilization) versus contextual factors (e.g. information availability) in 19 German state elections and 3 German general elections between 2009 and 2017. We find that the ease of identifiability of alternative future governments varies significantly across multi-party systems. We find that respondents are more likely to predict governments that they would like to see in office, that have a higher probability of receiving a majority of seats, and that consist of ideologically proximate parties. Combining survey data with a novel indicator of coalition signals, measured through a quantitative text analysis of newspaper coverage, we also find that voters consider positive pre-election coalition signals when predicting the government. Finally, we find that the information environment is much more relevant for correct coalition predictions than individual-level characteristics of respondents. While individual attributes do influence predictive ability, these factors are strongly dominated by the context in which the prediction is taking place. The information environment has by far the largest effect on predicting coalition outcomes. Our results have implications for the literature on strategic voting in multiparty settings, as well as the literature on accountability.
Popular elections are at the heart of representative democracy. Thus, understanding the laws and practices that govern such elections is essential to understanding modern democracy. In this book, Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political forces must solve. Coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. This book employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws. This book also considers not just what happens when political forces succeed in solving the coordination problems inherent in the electoral system they face but also what happens when they fail.
During the 2010 gubernatorial elections, we elicit voter beliefs about the closeness of the election before and after showing different polls, which, depending on treatment, indicate a close or not-close race. Subjects update their beliefs in response to polls, but overestimate the probability of a very close election. However, turnout is unaffected by beliefs about election closeness. A follow-up RCT, conducted during the 2014 gubernatorial elections at much larger scale, also points to little relationship between poll information about closeness and turnout. We caveat that the strength of our evidence depends on assumptions regarding our treatments’ impacts on beliefs. (JEL C93, D72)
The potential influence of perceived popularity of political parties or candidates on individual vote choice is most commonly studied in terms of a ‘bandwagon effect’. However, there is confusion over exactly what the bandwagon effect is. In this article, I seek to remedy this confusion by providing a clear definition and typology of bandwagon effects, grounded in a review which reappraises existing scholarship. I argue that the bandwagon effect is a distinct social phenomenon involving an individual-level change in vote choice or turnout decision towards a more or increasingly popular candidate or party, motivated initially by this popularity. I then break this down employing a typology which draws on distinctions made in the literature between static and dynamic, and conversion and mobilisation effects. This conception of the bandwagon effect leaves it open to the operation of a variety of possible underlying processes. Scholars should apply such clear concepts as are proposed here in bandwagon research, to situate and clarify their contributions theoretically and offer a more nuanced understanding of whether, how and why bandwagon effects occur across different political contexts.
Although political polls show stability over short periods of time, most media coverage of polls highlights recurrent changes in the political competition. We present evidence for a snowball effect where small and insignificant changes in polls end up in the media coverage as stories about changes. To demonstrate this process, we rely on the full population of political polls in Denmark and a combination of human coding and supervised machine learning of more than four thousand news articles. Through these steps, we show how a horserace coverage of polls about change can rest on a foundation of stability.
Polls have had a number of high-profile misses in recent elections. We review the current polling environment, the performance of polls in a historical context, the mechanisms of polling error, and the causes of several recent misses in Britain and the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, polling errors have been constant over time, although the level of error has always been substantially beyond that implied by stated margins of error. Generally, there is little evidence that voters lying about their vote intention (so-called ‘shy’ voters) is a substantial cause of polling error. Instead, polling errors have most commonly resulted from problems with representative samples and weighting, undecided voters breaking in one direction, and to a lesser extent late swings and turnout models. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for polling both in terms of fixing the problems identified and new approaches to understanding public opinion.
Election polls, also called election surveys, have been under severe criticism because of apparent gaps between their outcomes and election results. In this article, we survey election poll performance in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel and discuss the current state of the art. We list the main data collection methods used in election surveys, describe a wide range of analysis techniques that can be applied to such data, and expand on the relatively new application of predictive models used in this context. A special section considers sources of error in election surveys followed by an introduction and a general discussion of an information quality framework for studying them. We conclude with a section on outlooks and proposals that require more research.
The findings of this study don't support that conclusion. Even among a sample with more education than the general population, inclusion of methodological information did not assist in understanding statistically-oriented news. And, those who could recall information had trouble understanding what it meant.
This article investigates how election information such as opinion polls can influence voting intention. The bandwagon effect claims that voters ‘float along’: a party experiencing increased support receives more support, and vice versa. Through a large national survey experiment, evidence is found of a bandwagon effect among Danish voters. When voters are exposed to a news story describing either an upwards or downwards movement for either a small or large party, they tend to move their voting intentions in the according direction. The effect is strongest in the positive direction – that is, when a party experiences increased support, more follows. Consistent effects are found across two different parties for a diverse national sample in a political context very different from earlier research on the bandwagon effects. Considering previous research and the fact that evidence is not found that suggests that the effect of polls vary across sociodemographic groups, the results imply that bandwagon behaviour is based not on social or political contingencies, such as media or political institution, but on fundamentals of political cognition.
The literature on poll effects focuses primarily on the impact that polls have on aggregate election outcomes. Seeking to better understand the individual-level dynamics of the influence of polls on the decision process, we examine how campaign-period polls and party attachments interact to influence one’s vote choice. We do so with an online voting experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to a variety of poll treatments in the context of a Canadian national election. We expect that partisans are likely to vote along party lines, regardless of the information conveyed in the poll treatment. We further examine how political sophistication and the nature of the poll results shape the vote choice among partisans. The results demonstrate that polls have little overall effect on the vote choice, though there is some evidence that partisanship, sophistication, and the nature of the race can condition the effects of polls on voting behavior.
Much recent theorizing about the utility of voting concludes that voting is an irrational act in that it usually costs more to vote than one can expect to get in return. 1 This conclusion is doubtless disconcerting ideologically to democrats; but ideological embarrassment is not our interest here. Rather we are concerned with an apparent paradox in the theory. The writers who constructed these analyses were engaged in an endeavor to explain political behavior with a calculus of rational choice; yet they were led by their argument to the conclusion that voting, the fundamental political act, is typically irrational. We find this conflict between purpose and conclusion bizarre but not nearly so bizarre as a non-explanatory theory: The function of theory is to explain behavior and it is certainly no explanation to assign a sizeable part of politics to the mysterious and inexplicable world of the irrational. 2 This essay is, therefore, an effort to reinterpret the voting calculus so that it can fit comfortably into a rationalistic theory of political behavior. We describe a calculus of voting from which one infers that it is reasonable for those who vote to do so and also that it is equally reasonable for those who do not vote not to do so. Furthermore we present empirical evidence that citizens actually behave as if they employed this calculus. 3
This article examines the information the news media provide about public opinion polls. To do this, the study uses standards established by the American Association for Public Opinion Researchers and the National Council on Public Polls to evaluate how polls about the presidential election were reported in four major national newspapers and four smaller newspapers in the fall of 2000. The study found that some newspapers do better at providing information about polls than others, almost all articles do not disclose important information about polls, a newspaper does a better job at providing information about polls sponsored by the newspaper itself than it does about outside polls, and large, national newspapers do no better at reporting information about polls than smaller, more locally oriented newspapers. The article concludes that the media do not disclose the "minimal essential information" for the public to determine a poll's reliability and validity and that It would be in the best interest of polling organizations, newspapers, and the public for more information to be provided about the polls that are made public.
Despite decades of scholarly inquiry, the debate on the existence of a bandwagon effect in politics remains undecided. This
article aims to overcome the limitations of previous experimental and survey research. We test to what extent success in real-life
polling outcomes of the previous weeks influences subsequent vote intentions. To this end, we designed a large-scale survey
experiment among a diverse cross-section of the Dutch electorate (N = 23,421). We find that simple polling outcomes by themselves do not affect subsequent vote intentions. We do find evidence
for a subtle but relevant bandwagon effect: An emphasis on growth in the opinion polls stimulates subsequent support. However,
there is no evidence that the bandwagon effect is more apparent among people who were on the fence.
We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information from mainland France. We estimate that knowing the exit poll information decreases voter turnout by about 11 percentage points. Our study is the first clean empirical design outside of the laboratory to demonstrate the effect of such knowledge on voter turnout. Furthermore, we find that exit poll information significantly increases bandwagon voting; that is, voters who choose to turn out are more likely to vote for the expected winner.
This study investigates strategic voting for small parties in proportional representation systems, in previous work sometimes referred to as threshold insurance voting (Cox, 1997). Starting from theories of rational voting (Downs, 1957), three conditions for threshold insurance voting are developed: the voter considers potential government outcomes, votes for a party at risk of falling below an electoral threshold, and votes for another party than his or her most preferred one. The conditions are tested on the case of the 2010 Swedish general election. Using extensive data material and a conditional logit model of vote choice, the results show that in this election voters cast strategic votes for at least one of the small parties, the Christian Democrats which was included in the incumbent government coalition.
In the last 40 years a variety of studies has fairly clearly answered the question of what journalists do with political poll results. 1 This study was done to answer the question: What do readers do with poll results? When analyzing the quality of political poll reporting, most researchers have focused on the journalistic output—on articles that include poll results. Refer-ring to results of content analyses, several scholars have described structural and formal aspects of political poll reporting. 2 To analyze the articles' formal quality, the "Standards for Minimal Disclosure" by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) have become widely prominent. These guidelines were issued in 1969 and state that public opinion researchers should "report or make available" at least eight technical details about how a poll was conducted in every poll report. 3 Because of the guidelines' simplicity, researchers in several countries analyzed poll reports in the media, with regard to techni-cal details mentioned and many were attracted by the philosophy of the more, the better. In 1990, Rollberg, Sanders and Buffalo argued for the publication of technical details in poll reports: If newspapers' stories routinely included all eight disclosure standards, along with clearly understandable definitions of those standards, they would be serving two of the purposes of journalism: reporting the news and educating the readers. 4 The findings support the hypothesis that poll reports that include many technical details about how the polling methods were encoded and stored were less successful than information in poll reports that included fewer technical details. __________________________________________ Wichmann is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Hohenheim in Germany.
This article offers organizing principles to an emerging research agenda that analyses how parliamentary politics affects voter considerations. It uses the process by which votes are turned into policy as a unifying framework: every step in the process poses incentives for voters and encourages different types of strategic behaviour by voters. The standard version of strategic voting commonly found in analyses of voter choice is about the step familiar from the Anglo-American model – the allocation of seats based on votes – yet insights about voter behaviour originated from that model have been inadvertently reified and assumed to apply universally. The article identifies a set of empirical implications about the likelihood of voters employing policy-oriented strategies under different circumstances.
This study aims at contributing to the literature on the effect of political competition on electoral participation. I test the Downsian Closeness Hypothesis (DCH) on data from runoffs in general elections in Hungary. The expected closeness of the runoffs is proxied with first round margins of victory. The findings of the paper are consistent with the DCH: increases in margins between two parties in the first round significantly decrease turnout in the second, even when turnout in the first round is controlled for. This is in line with the theoretical considerations of the DCH but contrary to a large part of the existing empirical literature. The estimates of closeness are substantially greater than in previous papers and suggest that previous studies of the DCH using actual closeness as a proxy for expected closeness encountered a serious measurement error problem.
This study of press coverage of the 1968 presidential campaign finds great uniformity among 20 newspapers in discussion of issues and of qualities of candidates.
This paper addresses television and newspaper reporting of pre-election polls during the 1997 Canadian Election, examining both the emphasis given to polls and the quality of reporting of methodological information. The findings suggest that the media relied heavily on polls to chart the dynamics of the campaign, practicing horse-race journalism at the expense of coverage of substantive campaign issues. Polls were typically treated as matters of fact, with their limitations rarely discussed. Moreover, seldom was more than scant methodological information provided for polls, inhibiting the public's ability to evaluate their results.
We find that strategic sequencing and other factors sort parties roughly into two groups. Low-ranking parties lose part of their inherent support, compared to probabilistic expectations, while high-ranking parties profit from the shift. Our method is to graph the worldwide mean seat shares of parties at various ranks by size against the largest party share (Nagayama triangle format). The resulting empirical pattern looks complex, yet when we adjust a probabilistic model to account for strategic and other factors that may hurt the smaller parties, the fit becomes close. The number of parties that profit from transfers is close to the inverse of the fractional share of the largest party. The model fits best when the transfer is assumed to involve about one-half of inherent minor party support. This is a novel way to estimate the universal average strength of strategic and other factors that work against the smaller parties. The empirical worldwide mean pattern offers us a norm against which seat share distributions in individual countries or single elections can be compared.
Much recent theorizing about the utility of voting concludes that voting is an irrational act in that it usually costs more to vote than one can expect to get in return. This conclusion is doubtless disconcerting ideologically to democrats; but ideological embarrassment is not our interest here. Rather we are concerned with an apparent paradox in the theory. The writers who constructed these analyses were engaged in an endeavor to explain political behavior with a calculus of rational choice; yet they were led by their argument to the conclusion that voting, the fundamental political act, is typically irrational. We find this conflict between purpose and conclusion bizarre but not nearly so bizarre as a non-explanatory theory: The function of theory is to explain behavior and it is certainly no explanation to assign a sizeable part of politics to the mysterious and inexplicable world of the irrational. This essay is, therefore, an effort to reinterpret the voting calculus so that it can fit comfortably into a rationalistic theory of political behavior. We describe a calculus of voting from which one infers that it is reasonable for those who vote to do so and also that it is equally reasonable for those who do not vote not to do so. Furthermore we present empirical evidence that citizens actually behave as if they employed this calculus.