Related papers: Why polls fail to predict elections
Opinion polls have now become a very important component of society because they are now a defacto component of our daily news cycle and because their results influence governments and business in ways which are not always obvious to us.…
We combine fine-grained spatially referenced census data with the vote outcomes from the 2016 US presidential election. Using this dataset, we perform ecological inference using distribution regression (Flaxman et al, KDD 2015) with a…
We propose a framework to measure, evaluate, and rank campaign effectiveness in the ongoing 2016 U.S. presidential election. Using Twitter data collected from Sept. 2015 to Jan. 2016, we first uncover the tweeting tactics of the candidates…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
Nowadays, in societies threatened by atomization, selfishness, short-term thinking, and alienation from political life, there is a renewed debate about classical questions concerning the quality of democratic decision-making. In this work a…
Advances in machine learning and the increasing availability of high-dimensional data have led to the proliferation of social science research that uses the predictions of machine learning models as proxies for measures of human activity or…
Social media users express their political preferences via interaction with other users, by spontaneous declarations or by participation in communities within the network. This makes a social network such as Twitter a valuable data source…
Understanding and mitigating political bias in online social media platforms are crucial tasks to combat misinformation and echo chamber effects. However, characterizing political bias temporally using computational methods presents…
Online social networks are known to be demographically biased. Currently there are questions about what degree of representativity of the physical population they have, and how population biases impact user-generated content. In this paper…
Social surveys have been widely used as a method of obtaining public opinion. Sometimes it is more ideal to collect opinions by presenting questions in free-response formats than in multiple-choice formats. Despite their advantages,…
Despite the prevalence of voting systems in the real world there is no consensus among researchers of how people vote strategically, even in simple voting settings. This paper addresses this gap by comparing different approaches that have…
This study aims to understand the South African political context by analysing the sentiments shared on Twitter during the local government elections. An emphasis on the analysis was placed on understanding the discussions led around four…
Subjective well-being is a key metric in economic, medical, and policy decision-making. As artificial intelligence provides scalable tools for modelling human outcomes, it is crucial to evaluate whether large language models (LLMs) can…
In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of the Twitter discussion on the 2016 Austrian presidential elections. In particular, we extracted and analyzed a data-set consisting of 343645 Twitter messages related to the 2016 Austrian…
We carry out a post-election analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election (USPE) using a prediction model derived from the Small Area Estimation (SAE) methodology. With pollster data obtained one week prior to the election day,…
The large majority of inferences drawn in empirical political research follow from model-based associations (e.g. regression). Here, we articulate the benefits of predictive modeling as a complement to this approach. Predictive models aim…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
In our work we analyse the political disaffection or "the subjective feeling of powerlessness, cynicism, and lack of confidence in the political process, politicians, and democratic institutions, but with no questioning of the political…
Estimating population models from uncertain observations is an important problem in ecology. Perretti et al. observed that standard Bayesian state-space solutions to this problem may provide biased parameter estimates when the underlying…
The voter model is a simple agent-based model to mimic opinion dynamics in social networks: a randomly chosen agent adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbour. This process is repeated until a consensus emerges. Although the basic…