Affect versus cognition: Wishful thinking on election day: An analysis using exit poll data from Belgium

Abstract

Citizens tend to overestimate the electoral success of their preferred party. We investigate the extent to which Belgian voters overestimate the result of the party that they vote for and the factors that explain which voters do so more than others. Our focus is on the impact of educational attainment and partisan attachment on the overestimation of one’s party’s result. Previous research in this field has relied on data gathered in the months before the elections, which introduces a substantial amount of uncertainty and variation over time into the measurements of citizens’ vote share estimations. As an alternative, we investigate voters’ estimations of their party’s electoral success by means of data gathered in an exit poll survey. Our results show partisan attachments to have a strong impact on overestimations, which suggests that a wishful thinking mechanism is in play. Furthermore, we find that the extent to which partisan attachments increase citizens’ overestimations depends on a voter’s level of education.