This paper presents an experimental study of the effects of polls on voters’ welfare. The analysis shows that polls have a different effect on closely divided and lopsided divided electorates. The data show that in closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information on the voters’ distribution of preferences significantly raises the participation of subject...

A wide range of potentially useful data are available for election forecasting: the results of previous elections, a multitude of preelection polls, and predictors such as measures of national and statewide economic performance. How accurate are different forecasts? We estimate predictive uncertainty via analysis of data collected from past elections (actual outcomes, preelection polls, and mod...

To what extend can one use Twitter in opinion polls for political elections? Merely counting Twitter messages mentioning political party names is no guarantee for obtaining good election predictions. By improving the quality of the document collection and by performing sentiment analysis, predictions based on entity counts in tweets can be considerably improved, and become nearly as good as tra...

Crowd-sourcing is increasingly being used to provide answers to online polls and surveys. However, existing systems, while taking care of the mechanics of attracting crowd workers, poll building, and payment, provide little to help the survey-maker or pollster in obtaining statistically significant results devoid of even the obvious selection biases. This paper proposes InterPoll, a platform fo...

While drivers are not expected to vote while driving, VANETs can be an excellent media for dissemination of decentralized regional polls and for prerecorded votes/opinions on regional issues in a decentralized opinion poll. We propose and evaluate heuristics for scheduling messages in a VANET broadcastingbased dissemination of decentralized opinion polling data among self-interested participant...

PO L L S P ROV I D E I N F O R M AT I O N A B O U T how well the parties are doing in a campaign. That information may affect voters’ perceptions of the various parties’ chances of winning in a Arst past the post (FPP) system such as Canada or the chances of being part of a coalition government in a proportional representation (PR) system. By affecting voters’ expectations about the outcome of ...

Multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP) has become widely used in political science to estimate subnational opinion from national polls. This method takes into account both demographic and state-level effects and has greatly expanded knowledge of public opinion at the subnational level. In this paper, I assess the use of MRP on two cluster-sampled polls, the American National Electi...

We set up a model of elections or referendums with two alternatives to study how voter turnout and election outcomes are a¤ected by the publication of exit polls on election day. We …nd that the introduction of an exit poll in‡uences the incentive to vote both before and after the poll is published, but the sign of the e¤ect is generally ambiguous. The fact that exit polls in‡uence the incentiv...