Related papers: Why polls fail to predict elections

Basede on a study of the modern presidencial democracies in South America, we present a statistical mechanics exploration of the collective, coordinated action of political actors in the legislative chamber that may result on the…

Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…

We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined electoral phenomenon that each…

Overestimation of turnout has long been an issue in election surveys, with nonresponse bias or voter overrepresentation identified as major sources of bias. However, adjusting for nonignorable nonresponse bias is substantially challenging.…

The only acceptable form of polling in the multi-billion dollar survey research field utilizes representative samples. We argue that with proper statistical adjustment, non-representative polling can provide accurate predictions, and often…

Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…

We demonstrate that machine learning enables the capability to infer an individual's propensity to vote from their past actions and attributes. This is useful for microtargeting voter outreach, voter education and get-out-the-vote (GOVT)…

Evolution has resulted in highly developed abilities in many natural intelligences to quickly and accurately predict mechanical phenomena. Humans have successfully developed laws of physics to abstract and model such mechanical phenomena.…

Automated decision systems are increasingly used for consequential decision making -- for a variety of reasons. These systems often rely on sophisticated yet opaque models, which do not (or hardly) allow for understanding how or why a given…

In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for…

We have retrieved and analyzed several millions of Twitter messages corresponding to the Spanish General elections held on the 20th of December 2015 and repeated on the 26th of June 2016. The availability of data from two electoral…

As Machine Learning (ML) is still a recent field of study, especially outside the realm of abstract Mathematics and Computer Science, few works have been conducted on the political aspect of large Language Models (LLMs), and more…

As artificial intelligence and machine learning tools become more accessible, and scientists face new obstacles to data collection (e.g., rising costs, declining survey response rates), researchers increasingly use predictions from…

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly used in survey contexts to simulate human preferences. While many research endeavors evaluate the quality of synthetic GenAI data by comparing model-generated responses to gold-standard survey results,…

The 2024 US presidential election is the first major contest to occur in the US since the popularization of large language models (LLMs). Building on lessons from earlier shifts in media (most notably social media's well studied role in…

Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years,…

Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…

At the tipping point, it is known that small incident can trigger dramatic societal shift. Getting early-warning signals for such changes are valuable to avoid detrimental outcomes such as riots or collapses of nations. However, it is…