Serbia goes to the polls

Serbia's parliamentary elections on 23 December will mark the definitive end of the Slobodan Milosevic era, as Serbia's former opposition consolidates power and takes full control of Serbia's institutions. However, this transition promises to be anything but smooth. The 18-party coalition, whose supporters ousted Milosevic in October, risks collapse after the elections and the tasks facing the incoming government are truly monumental. The new administration will have to grapple with the legacies of a decade of war and isolation, as well as resolve the fundamental question of Serbia's status.     

Momentum in the polls raises electoral expectations

Voters rely on opinion polls to help them predict who is going to win elections. But they are regularly exposed to different polling results over time. How do changes in the polls affect their expectations? I show that when the polls indicate that a party’s support has increased, voters’ expectations for that party’s performance will be higher than they would be at the same vote share but without such evidence of growth, because the party appears to have momentum. Across six survey experiments in Britain (total N > 14,000), I find that this effect persists even when changes in vote share are well within the margin of error, when comparing a small change in vote share to consistently polling at the larger vote share, when the change makes little difference to a party’s objective probability of victory, and when voters have strong preferences that might colour their interpretation of the polls. In short, the appearance of momentum in the polls robustly raises voters’ expectations that a party will win an election. This finding has major implications for any area of research in political science where expectations feature, for theoretical understandings of how people perceive the future, and for salient policy debates about the regulation of opinion polls.     

Winning at the polls and in the polls: the incumbency advantage in surveys of U.S. house voters

The success of House incumbents at the polls is well known and has been studied extensively. This paper focuses on the incumbents' success in the polls: the support bestowed upon incumbents by survey respondents is substantially higher than that received from the voters. The incumbency advantage at the polls, estimated at about 10% in the most recent elections, is almost doubled when measured in the polls. The data, drawn from the 1982–1996 National Election Studies, show that respondents do not reward all winners; candidates elected to open seats have not benefitted from the kind of bounce consistently enjoyed by winning incumbents. In addition, the pattern of respondents' misreports appears to be inconsistent with earlier explanations based on instrument effects. Respondent bias should be accounted for in order to reach correct estimates of the incumbency advantage in individual-level data.     

Public opinion polls on Jews in France and Austria

Harris surveys a number of overlapping debates relating to 'difference' and the 'public/private' distinction, including: positions that perceive differences only as labels to secure governmentality; that treat difference as something to be consumed; that accept but confine difference to the private domain; that attempt to reconcile collective difference to the demands of a liberal theory of individual rights; that counter this by suggesting a need to rethink the relationship between state and society to allow for the creation of multicultural public forms; that insist that the option of difference should be enlarged to embrace the fundamental differences of economic inequality; that would see the appeal to cultural differences as only an ideology that masks the contradictions of modern liberal capitalism; and those, like Harris's own, that want to focus on the multifaceted, interactive and relational nature of difference. Identity and culture, he argues, are achieved processes deriving from a specific praxis of interpretation and enforcement located within the field of historically constituted social relations shaped by grids of meanings, access to resources and power. Once we give up the idea of cultures as sealed entities and recognize that even within cultural boundaries communication is essentially about difference and requires translation, then the problematic nature of the constituent elements of 'multiculturalism' - multi-, -cultural-, -ism - renders the whole concept questionable. Undoubtedly, most avowed multiculturalists are committed to some sense of the 'good' or 'better' society, but it will simply not do to overburden the notion of multiculturalism, however radically conceived and well intentioned, with the task of achieving social justice.     

The effects of election polls in Mexico's 2018 presidential campaign

This research note presents the results of an experimental design to study the effects of poll releases in Mexico's 2018 presidential campaign. Our research design allows us to test the conditions in which polling information can alter voters' reported preferences. The results show that the exposure to polling results makes respondents more likely to identify themselves as undecided. We interpret this change as a sign of voters' willingness to form veridical attitudes. To support this interpretation, we show that the effect is stronger among citizens with the ability and motivation to elaborate on the polling information. The findings contribute to the debate about the consequences of publishing pre-election poll results that show a clear advantage for one of the candidates.     

Union members at the polls in diverse trade union landscapes

This article investigates to what extent social democratic parties still benefit from the support of union members at the polls. Not only are social democratic parties confronted with new competitors in the party systems, but also the union confederations of the socialist labour movement are in some countries losing their dominant position due to the rise of separate professional confederations. It is argued in the article that the effect of union membership on voting choice is conditioned by the structure of the trade union movement. The support of union members for social democracy is fostered by the strength of the confederations historically close to this party family, while it is hampered when strong separate (or politically unaffiliated) white‐collar confederations exist. Using European Social Survey and Swedish Public Opinion data, the article shows that social democratic parties still enjoy important support from trade union members, but at the same time are under fierce competition from bourgeois and green parties among members of white‐collar confederations. This reinforces the challenges for social democracy to build new voters’ coalitions in post‐industrial societies.     

Time inconsistency of monetary policy: Empirical evidence from polls

While the basic model of time inconsistency, put forward by Barro and Gordon (Barro, R. J., & Gordon, D. B. (1983). Journal of Political Economy, 91, 589–610) is widely accepted now, several authors have expressed serious doubts about the empirical relevance of the model in explaining inflation. Interestingly enough, few attempts have been made so far to test for the existence of inflationary biases empirically. Theory predicts a positive correlation between a monetary authority's relative preference for the high employment goal and inflation. Using polling data from six countries as a proxy for public preferences we provide empirical evidence in favor of the Barro-Gordon-model.     

Markets vs. polls as election predictors: An historical assessment

Prediction markets have drawn considerable attention in recent years as a tool for forecasting elections. But how accurate are they? Do they outperform the polls, as some scholars argue? Do prices in election markets carry information beyond the horserace in the latest polls? This paper assesses the accuracy of US presidential election betting markets in years before and after opinion polling was introduced. Our results are provocative. First, we find that market prices are far better predictors in the period without polls than when polls were available. Second, we find that market prices of the pre-poll era predicted elections almost on par with polls following the introduction of scientific polling. Finally, when we have both market prices and polls, prices add nothing to election prediction beyond polls. To be sure, early election markets were (surprisingly) good at extracting campaign information without scientific polling to guide them. For more recent markets, candidate prices largely follow the polls.     

From uninformed to informed choices: Voters,pre-election polls and updating

Pre-election opinion poll results for U.S. presidential contests have large variation in the early parts of the primary campaigns, yet pre-election opinion polls later in the campaign are typically within several percentage points of the actual outcome of the contest in November. This paper argues this trend demonstrates that voters are beginning to poll “correctly” – that is, to ascertain their most-preferred candidate. This convergence process is consistent with boundedly rational voters making decisions with low information. We examine the process by which voters can use opinion polls to guide their candidate choice. We undertake a series of laboratory experiments where uninformed voters choose between two candidates after participating in a series of pre-election polls. We demonstrate that voters update their beliefs about candidate locations using information contained in the opinion polls. We compare two behavioral models for the updating process and find significant evidence to support a boundedly rational Bayesian updating assumption. This assumption about the updating process is key to many theoretical results which argue that voters have the potential to aggregate information via a coordination signal and for their beliefs to converge to the true state of the world. This finding also indicates that uninformed voters are able to use pre-election polls to help them make correct decisions.     

Vote Compass in British Columbia: insights from and about published polls

ABSTRACT

Published polls in the 2013 British Columbia provincial election conspicuously failed. This paper uses the Vote Compass Voter Advice Applications to shed light on the prediction failure. At the same time, it considers whether the dynamics of expressed vote intention in the Compass can be deployed as a rolling cross-section – in particular, whether the dynamics of participant self-selection are driven by temporally differentiated bias. Analysis will include selection effects within the Compass, as participants choose whether or not to proceed beyond the “voter advice” component to the political perception and intention batteries.     

Modeling the influence of polls on elections: a population dynamics approach

We propose a population dynamics model for quantifying the effects of polling data on the outcome of multi-party elections decided by a majority-rule voting process. We divide the population into two groups: committed voters impervious to polling data, and susceptible voters whose decision to vote is influenced by data, depending on its reliability. This population-based approach to modeling the process sidesteps the problem of upscaling models based upon the choices made by individuals. We find releasing poll data is not advantageous to leading candidates, but it can be exploited by those closely trailing. The analysis identifies the particular type of voting impetus at play in different stages of an election and could help strategists optimize their influence on susceptible voters.     

Using state polls to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes

This paper uses pre-election polls to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in the states and the Electoral College. The approach is notable in three ways. First, we employ state-level polls to predict voting outcomes in the states; second, we associate probabilities with alternative election outcomes, and third, we identify states most likely to be pivotal in the Electoral College. Using information available on the day before the election, we estimated that the probability of a Republican victory in the Electoral College in the 2004 election was 47.27%.     

From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2010 British general election

This paper outlines and discusses techniques for three stages in forecasting parliamentary seats from British opinion polls: adjusting and aggregating published vote-intention figures from across different polls; forecasting how public opinion might change before election day; and predicting the seat totals from the forecasted election-day vote shares. Specifically, we consider a state-space model for opinion polls which correct for house effects and other sources of survey error, the estimation of the historical relationship between polls and the election-day share of the vote, and a probabilistic approach to predicting the winner in each constituency.