Predicting Election Results Research Articles

Why the Pirate Party Won the German Election of 2009 or The Trouble With Predictions: A Response to Tumasjan, A., Sprenger, T. O., Sander, P. G., & Welpe, I. M. “Predicting Elections With Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal About Political Sentiment”

In their article “Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal About Political Sentiment,” the authors Andranik Tumasjan, Timm O. Sprenger, Philipp G. Sandner, and Isabell M. Welpe (TSSW) the authors claim that it would be possible to predict election outcomes in Germany by examining the relative frequency of the mentions of political parties in Twitter messages posted during the election campaign. In this response we show that the results of TSSW are contingent on arbitrary choices of the authors. We demonstrate that as of yet the relative frequency of mentions of German political parties in Twitter message allows no prediction of election results.

Election Forecasts with Twitter - How 140 Characters Reflect the Political Landscape

This study investigates whether microblogging messages on Twitter validly mirror the political landscape offline and can be used to predict election results. In the context of the 2009 German federal election, we conducted a sentiment analysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician. Our results show that Twitter is used extensively for political deliberation and that the mere number of party mentions accurately reflects the election result. The tweets' sentiment (e.g., positive and negative emotions associated with a politician) corresponds closely to voters' political preferences. In addition, party sentiment profiles reflect the similarity of political positions between parties. We derive suggestions for further research and discuss the use of microblogging services to aggregate dispersed information.

Election Forecasts With Twitter

This study investigates whether microblogging messages on Twitter validly mirror the political landscape off-line and can be used to predict election results. In the context of the 2009 German federal election, we conducted a sentiment analysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician. Our results show that Twitter is used extensively for political deliberation and that the mere number of party mentions accurately reflects the election result. The tweets' sentiment (e.g., positive and negative emotions associated with a politician) corresponds closely to voters' political preferences. In addition, party sentiment profiles reflect the similarity of political positions between parties. We derive suggestions for further research and discuss the use of microblogging services to aggregate dispersed information.

Surveys: Scientific predictions or navel gazing?

Pre-election surveys to predict election outcomes have produced inconsistent results because different researchers or research organisations apply different methodologies and research designs even when dealing with the same subject. The object of this article is to interrogate the nature of survey research as a scientific tool in general and to trace the development of its use in political and government settings, especially in South Africa, to predict election results. The study strives to establish whether or not some pre-election surveys in South Africa rely on inadequate methodology, or else succumb to political pressure to produce predictions that favour a certain party? Attention is directed to issues of reliability and the validity of survey results that can predict the outcomes of elections with a high degree of accuracy. We examine the extent to which different survey organisations and researchers heed the prerequisites and demands of scientific methods in research and, more especially, the methodologies used in surveys. Examining results produced by various research organisations we explore whether political surveys today are adequate tools to predict scientifically outcomes in an election or whether they are simply mechanisms used to arrive at desired goals at the expense of scientific methods. Common flaws in methodologies used to make predictions are identified and discussed.

Punting on the Thames: Electoral Betting in Interwar Britain

Punters have been betting on election outcomes for as long as there have been competitive elections. Electoral spread betting is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon. This article explores the development of this practice in early twentieth-century Britain, charting the markets in election ‘Majorities’ in the period between 1910 and 1931. Unlike modern Internet-based spread betting, which has proved remarkably accurate in predicting election outcomes, interwar Majorities market traders were repeatedly wide of the mark. This article makes use of social science theory and historical analysis to explain the predictive failure of these interwar markets. Political punters, it argues, were drawn from a narrow socio-economic and geographic spectrum, and consequently did not have access to the range of information necessary to make informed decisions about politics. Further, the uncertain political environment — characterized by the rise of Labour, the quadrupling of the electorate between 1918 and 1928, and the emergence of genuine three-party politics in the 1920s — created unprecedented difficulties for would-be political punters. In retrospect, Labour's displacement of the Liberals and the hegemony of the interwar Conservative Party may seem inevitable, but at the time the progress of party politics struck both participants and observers as much less certain.

The Attractiveness Halo: Why Some Candidates are Perceived More Favorably than Others

Olivola and Todorov (Elected in 100 milliseconds: appearance-based trait inferences and voting. J Nonverbal Behav, 2010) provide a convincing demonstration that competence ratings based on 1-second exposures to paired photos of US congressional candidates predict election outcomes at better than chance levels. However, they do not account for variation in competence judgments. In their analysis, Olivola and Todorov show that attractiveness, familiarity, babyfacedness and age are proximal predictors of vote choice, but find that after controlling for competence these factors no longer reliably influence the margin of electoral victory. Drawing on well-documented halo effects of attractiveness on character-based inferences and the extensive literature on mere exposure effects, we re-organize Olivola and Todorov’s analysis into a simple path model to explore the causal ordering of these factors. We find that spontaneous assessments of attractiveness and familiarity occur prior to attributions of competence, and thus exert a downstream effect on judgments of competence.

Forecasting Control of State Governments and Redistricting Authority After the 2010 Elections

This article makes forecasts for the 2010 state legislative and gubernatorial elections. These forecasts indicate the Republicans will add control of 15 legislative chambers and nine governor’s offices, leaving them with 51 chambers and 32 governorships. Forecasts about the extent of redistricting authority by the Democratic and Republican parties indicate the Republicans will have authority over 125 U.S. House seats, while the Democrats will have authority over 62. In a chamber level analysis of 2,141 legislative and a state level analysis of 758 gubernatorial elections, four national forces are used in predicting election outcomes from 1950 to present: presidential approval, change in per capita income, midterm loss, and the percentage of respondents who say they will vote for a Democrat for the U.S. House. The differential effect of these forces in states with the straight-ticket option is also taken into account. Monte Carlo simulation that takes into account states’ different rules regarding redistricting authority is then utilized to assess how many U.S. House seats the Democratic and Republican parties will control.

Voting behavior is reflected in amygdala response across cultures

Voting to determine one's leaders is among the most important decisions we make, yet little is known about the brain's role in how we come to these decisions. Behavioral studies have indicated that snap judgments of political candidates' faces can predict election outcomes but that the traits that lead to these judgments differ across cultures. Here we sought to investigate the neural basis for these judgments. American and Japanese natives performed simulated voting judgments of actual American and Japanese political candidates while neural activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Candidates for whom participants chose to vote elicited stronger responses in the bilateral amygdala than candidates for whom participants chose not to vote. This was true regardless of either the participant's culture or the target's culture, suggesting that these voting decisions provoked the same neural response cross-culturally. In addition, we observed a participant culture by target culture interaction in the bilateral amygdala. American and Japanese participants both showed a stronger response to cultural outgroup faces than they did to cultural in group faces, however this was unrelated to their voting decisions. These data provide insight to the mechanisms that underlie our snap judgments of others when making voting decisions and provide a neural correlate to cross-cultural consensus in social inferences.

Predicting Election Outcomes from Positive and Negative Trait Assessments of Candidate Images

Conventional wisdom, and a growing body of behavioral research, suggests that the nonverbal image of a candidate influences voter decision making. We presented subjects with images of political candidates and asked them to make four trait judgments based solely on viewing the photographs. Subjects were asked which of the two faces exhibited more competence, attractiveness, deceitfulness, and threat, which are arguably four of the most salient attributes that can be conveyed by faces. When we compared our subjects' choices to the actual election outcomes, we found that the candidates chosen as more likely to physically threaten the subjects actually lost 65% of the real elections. As expected, our findings support the conclusions of Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, and Hall (2005) by showing a positive correlation between the competence judgments and the real election outcomes. Surprisingly, attractiveness was correlated with losing elections, with the effect being driven by faces of candidates who looked politically incompetent yet personally attractive. Our findings have implications for future research on negative political communication, as they suggest that both threatening first impressions and fleeting impressions of attractiveness can harm a candidate's electoral chances.

The effects of perceived competence and sociability on electoral outcomes

Previous research demonstrated that inferences of competence from the face are good predictors of electoral outcomes [Todorov, A., Mandisoza, A. N., Gore, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science, 308, 1623–1626]. In the current work we examined the role of another key dimension in social perception, namely perceived sociability. Results showed that people considered both competence and sociability, as inferred from the face, as related to higher chances of winning the elections. A different pattern emerged in relation to the actual electoral outcomes. Indeed, perceived competence was related to higher chances of winning, whereas perceived sociability was negatively related to electoral success. It is thus shown that these two fundamental dimensions in social perception exert opposite effects on voting behaviors.

The forecasting ability of Internet-based virtual futures market

Internet-based virtual futures markets (VFMs) have been used in predicting election results and movie ticket sales. We construct an Internet-based VFM to predict an underlying stock price. While the virtual futures market has received much attention, questions remain as to the ideal number of participants. Results of Granger causality tests and analysis of directional accuracy show that a VFM with only a small number of participants (75) is able to generate informative futures prices useful in the prediction of the underlying stock price. Moreover, the participants were not professional investors but merely undergraduate finance students with only a cursory introduction to futures trading. Our results provide additional evidence supporting the use of VFMs in forecasting and show that VFMs are powerful forecasting tools.

Militant Nationalist Electoral Support: A Measurement Dilemma

It could by no means be argued that efforts to predict election results from public opinion data have an unblemished track record. From the disastrous misprediction of the U.S. presidential election in 1948 to the unheralded victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian election, pollsters have been criticized for ‘getting it wrong’, with shortcomings in the United Kingdom in 1992 and in France in 2002 attracting particular academic attention (Curtice, 1997, p. 317; Miguet, 2002, p. 207). In principle, serious failure in election forecasting should be a source of greater worry to newspaper editors than to academic political analysts, who are more concerned with understanding long-term trends than with offering ephemeral insights into the future. There are, however, circumstances where there is a serious problem of systematic bias in opinion data, an issue taken up further here. Northern Ireland is such an example: politically militant views have tended to be consistently understated (Whyte, 1990, p. 4; Evans & Duffy, 1997; Hayes & McAllister, 2001, p. 912). So much is this the case that it has been argued that ‘if the public had been anywhere near as moderate as they have generally represented themselves to pollsters during the past three decades there would not have been a Northern Ireland problem’ (Mitchell, O’Leary, & Evans, 2001, p. 732). The three following sections tackle this question by discussing in turn the nature of the problem, the challenge of explaining it, and its implications for the analysis of militant ethnonationalism.

Predicting Presidential and Other Multistage Election Outcomes Using State-Level Pre-Election Polls

Although much of the media attention during presidential election years focuses on polls tracking popular support for the major candidates, the complicated role played by the Electoral College in this multistage election process must be accounted for in order to address the issue of winning the presidency. State-level pre-election polls are used in a manner that allows the structure of multistage election processes to be addressed directly. We consider frequentist and Bayesian approaches for predicting election outcomes and discuss ways to incorporate such analyses in a course project suitable for undergraduates or graduate students studying statistics. Using state-level pre-election polling data, we consider the U.S. presidential election of 2004 and we also apply this approach to predict the control of the U.S. Senate in 2006. This class exercise has proved to be a useful “capstone project” which requires students to address a complicated problem by synthesizing multiple sources of available data and applying a combination of statistical methods. Using simulation-based approaches for addressing the multistage nature of presidential elections and control-of-Congress processes can be valuable and instructive for students of statistics and political science, and can be beneficial to the media in providing consumers with political news.

Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes

We show that inferences of competence based solely on facial appearance predicted the outcomes of U.S. congressional elections better than chance (e.g., 68.8% of the Senate races in 2004) and also were linearly related to the margin of victory. These inferences were specific to competence and occurred within a 1-second exposure to the faces of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective trait inferences can contribute to voting choices, which are widely assumed to be based primarily on rational and deliberative considerations.

Model predikce výsledků voleb - alternativní přístup k odhadům volebních výsledků ve volebních obvodech

Model predikce výsledků voleb - alternativní přístup k odhadům volebních výsledků ve volebních obvodech

A snapshot or a painting? Metaphors, myths, misuses and misunderstandings of marketing research information by journalists and other people who should know better

PurposeIn US political reporting, the top story has become the public opinion polls that purport to state the voters’ evaluations of potential candidates, current office holders or the impact of current events. Many politicians, in turn, often develop their campaign positions in response to the polls. This discussion aims to address how year after year, despite increasing spending by news organizations to predict election results, the polls are repeatedly unable to predict election outcomes. Excuses are made, while the misuse and misunderstanding of marketing research spreads to other types of public organizations.Design/methodology/approachPoints out the contradictions between public opinion polling predictions of election results and actual events, with explanations of the usually unstated qualitative limitations to survey data.FindingsQualitative research bias could have a greater impact on outcomes than statistical margins of error, although it is only the latter that is reported or discussed by the news media.Practical implicationsThis abuse and misuse of marketing research lowers the credibility of all marketing research, and the people in marketing research, should speak out. The pollsters want to keep their methods as having a mystical value as they sell their research information to the public and other data users. At worst, this is a misleading selling of marketing insight to the public and research experts should start to speak out, encouraging journalists to report more properly the reality of public opinion polls.Originality/valueThe popular metaphor of public opinion polls has been to call them a “snapshot” of public views. This offers a more realistic metaphor of survey data, an impressionistic painting that is influenced by numerous researchers or respondent biases that cannot be controlled.

Information and efficiency in political stock markets: using computerized markets to predict election results

This study concentrates on four computerized political markets in Germany between 1990 and 1998. While this new method for the prediction of election events worked quite well in the USA it did not perform as well in Germany. Searching for the causes of this distinction it is shown that, in contrast to the findings of Forsythe et al. (1992), (i) extraordinary profits were achieved less by people who took advantage of other people's anomalies than by those people who acquired an advantage from the existence of asymmetric information, (ii) the marginal trader hypothesis does not hold when applied to German markets, and that (iii) traders relied on public opinion polls. It is argued that these distinctions are caused by the differences in the German and the US voting systems. Additionally, it is shown that to a certain extent (iv) election markets were able to predict the contemporary mood of the electorate without the help of public opinion polls, (v) first of all the informed traders used public opinion polls as a source of information, and (vi) prices themselves became a source of information on which expectations were based.

Integrity in Prediction: The Responsibilities of Journalism and the Public for “Calling” Elections

This commentary explores the intersection of journalism and social science in the use of exit polls to explain and predict election outcomes. We consider whether the application of standard social scientific and statistical norms to election night journalism is ethical, and whether the news audience’s role in demanding and/or tolerating poll-driven election coverage is ethical. We suggest journalists can ethically use exit poll data to inform citizens about trends and issues but should wait to do so until after reporting actual election results.

The Partisan Heuristic in Low-Information Elections

Much literature has focused on the influence of partisan information on voter decision making. In this article, we attempt to gain a better understanding of this effect by comparing the survey responses of vote-choice questions that provide party labels and those that do not. We show that less educated survey respondents are substantially less likely to express a vote preference when party labels are not available to them. In addition, we also find evidence that those who can state a vote intention in nonpartisan races are less able to link their candidate choice to their party identification. We conclude by demonstrating that, when surveys do not provide partisan cues, the small number of re- spondents who are willing to state their vote intentions and the large number of those who appear to be guessing create great difficulties for pollsters trying to predict election results.

Wishes, expectations and actions: a survey on price formation in election stock markets

With error-prone and biased individual traders, can markets aggregate trader information and produce efficient outcomes? We review election stock market evidence that suggests this does happen. Individual traders appear biased and error-prone consistently, yet these markets prove quite efficient in predicting election outcomes. We also review work which documents comparable, but substantially different, phenomena in related laboratory markets. In addition, we report the results from a new laboratory session which shows how we can create particular biases that mirror those in election stock markets. Finally, we discuss how combined laboratory and field experiments can help us understand trader/market interactions.