Related papers: Why polls fail to predict elections
The impact of predictive algorithms on people's lives and livelihoods has been noted in medicine, criminal justice, finance, hiring and admissions. Most of these algorithms are developed using data and human capital from highly developed…
US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. There were intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of the electorate towards the achievements of the…
Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…
We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…
Political advertising on social media has fundamentally reshaped democratic deliberation, playing a central role in electoral campaigns and propaganda. However, its systemic impact remains largely theoretical or unexplored, raising critical…
Contributing to the toolbox for interpreting election results, we evaluate the robustness of election winners to random noise. We compare the robustness of different voting rules and evaluate the robustness of real-world election winners…
Political polls achieve their results by sampling a small number of potential voters rather than the population as a whole. This leads to sampling error which most polling agencies dutifully report. But factors such as nonrepresentative…
There have been several instances in our nation's history in which the presidential candidate who received the most popular votes did not win the presidency. Using a principal components analysis of recent presidential elections, we…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
We consider the performance of the foremost academic House of Representatives forecasting models in the 2018 elections. In creating open-source implementations of these models, we outline key underlying assumptions. We find that although…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
Nationally representative surveys track public opinion, yet they ask only a limited set of questions each year, limiting its potential to capture historical changes. To fill this gap, we develop a large language model (LLM)-based framework…
Social media influence online activity by recommending to users content strongly correlated with what they have preferred in the past. In this way they constrain users within filter bubbles that strongly limit their exposure to new or…
Prediction markets are widely treated as forecasting devices that reveal collective expectations about uncertain futures. This article argues that under specifiable conditions they also function as coordination mechanisms: public…
Traditional survey-based political issue polling is becoming less tractable due to increasing costs and risk of bias associated with growing non-response rates and declining coverage of key demographic groups. With researchers and pollsters…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in text generation and understanding, especially in simulating socio-political and economic patterns, serving as an alternative to traditional surveys. However, their global applicability remains…
The State and its citizens generate lots of data. Once stored and processed, data can help resolve questions in Social Sciences, where it is common to need data in a different level of aggregation than the data is presented. In election…
Advances in deep learning systems have allowed large models to match or surpass human accuracy on a number of skills such as image classification, basic programming, and standardized test taking. As the performance of the most capable…
Elections are the backbone of any democratic country, where voters elect the candidates as their representatives. The emergence of social networking sites has provided a platform for political parties and their candidates to connect with…
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising avenues for methodological and applied innovations in survey research by using synthetic respondents to emulate human answers and behaviour, potentially mitigating measurement and representation…