Closeness Counts: Increasing Precision and Reducing Errors in Mass Election Predictions

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Quek ◽  
Michael W. Sances
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
Partisan Bias ◽  
2012 Election ◽  
Multiple Constituencies ◽  
Economic Perceptions

Mass election predictions are increasingly used by election forecasters and public opinion scholars. While they are potentially powerful tools for answering a variety of social science questions, existing measures are limited in that they ask about victors rather than voteshares. We show that asking survey respondents to predict voteshares is a viable and superior alternative to asking them to predict winners. After showing respondents can make sensible quantitative predictions, we demonstrate how traditional qualitative forecasts lead to mistaken inferences. In particular, qualitative predictions vastly overstate the degree of partisan bias in election forecasts, and lead to wrong conclusions regarding how political knowledge exacerbates this bias. We also show how election predictions can aid in the use of elections as natural experiments, using the effect of the 2012 election on partisan economic perceptions as an example. Our results have implications for multiple constituencies, from methodologists and pollsters to political scientists and interdisciplinary scholars of collective intelligence.

scholarly journals BLIND SPOTS OF INFORMATION OPERATIONS: OF MICRO PROPAGANDA, ALGORITHM GAMING & HOW TO PROFIT FROM IT

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa-Maria Neudert ◽  
Samantha Bradshaw ◽  
Rebecca Lewis ◽  
Leon Yin ◽  
Samuel Woolley ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Political Candidates ◽  
Partisan Bias ◽  
Information Operations ◽  
Google Search ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Blind Spots

Techniques designed to manipulate public opinion and undermine information ecosystems are rapidly evolving while research lags behind technological innovation and strategic expertise. As a more sophisticated generation of information operations is fast to mature, the papers in this panel shed light on some of the blind spots of scholarly inquiry making visible new thematic strategies, technical infrastructures and both political and economic incentives. The first two papers examine the progression from general political propaganda geared towards influencing elections to highly issue-specific micro-propaganda. The first paper presents an analysis of anti-Semitic disinformation campaigns and harassment during the 2018 US midterms on Twitter and offers rich evidence from interviews with Jewish American opinion leaders about their impact. Drawing on data from Twitter’s Election Integrity Initiative, the second paper examines the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations and how hostile state actors frame and discuss gender identity & politics. The third paper presents an analysis of search engine optimization strategies that extremist YouTubers use in an attempt to game the algorithm and increase their visibility in the network. The fourth paper investigates the relationship between partisan bias associated with Google Search results and the success of political candidates associated with the search queries during elections and finds that partisan search media is a predictor for election outcomes. The fifth paper examines the emergence of a global political economy for manipulation and offers a grounded typology of the vendors, marketplaces, services, and products that are designed to turn a profit from swaying public opinion.

The Gallup poll, democracy, and the vox populi: Ideologies of interviewing and the communicability of modern life

2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (5-6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles L Briggs
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Real ◽  
Gallup Poll ◽  
Research Interviews

AbstractOne of Aaron Cicourel's most critical contributions to social science lies in his pioneering work on gaps between the complex pragmatics of research interviews and the ways that they are conceptualized by practitioners. This article argues for systematic attention to ideological constructions of interviewing, taking as its focus George Gallup's ‘civic model’ of polls and his efforts to transform them into a crucial foundation for democratic governance in the United States and beyond. Countering deep skepticism about polling among social scientists, politicians, and journalists in the 1930s and 1940s, Gallup fused ideologies of science, quantification, and democracy with a construction of the production, circulation, and reception of discourse about ‘public opinion’. This communicable cartography (or ideological map) shapes how the current Gallup ‘Editor-in-Chief ’ positions polling as the sine qua non for constructing subjects and states in a neoliberal age. An analysis of a Gallup poll suggests that this communicable cartography is inscribed in multiple ways in each presentation of polling data, thrusting readers into a textual universe that claims to know the ‘real vox populi’ and how it has connected US citizens and politicians for six decades.

scholarly journals The Probing of God-Bearer

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-425
Author(s):  
Artemy Magun
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Dialectical Logic ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
Opinion Polls ◽  
Extended Review

The article is simultaneously an extended review of the book by Grigory Yudin entitled Public Opinion; or, The Power of Numbers (EUSPb Press, 2020) and an essay on the phenomenon of public opinion in the light of the repressive tendencies of contemporary society from the standpoint of critical theory. Relying mostly on Adorno, the author shows that public opinion polls are not only the result of the alienating reification, but also an effect of the basic subjectivism which turns the relationship between the subject and society into a detached, contemplative, and judgmental attitude. The objectivization coincides with subjectivization. Thus, in accordance with Yudin’s book, social science, if it wants to be more than an instrument of bureaucratic domination, has to rely on dialectical logic

scholarly journals Making sense of the collective intelligence field: A review

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Solberg Söilen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alternative Methodology

The problem we want to solve is to find out what is new in the collective intelligence literature and how it is to be understood alongside other social science disciplines. The reason it is important is that collective intelligence and problems of collaboration seem familiar in the social sciences but do not necessarily fit into any of the established disciplines. Also, collective intelligence is often associated with the notion of wisdom of crowds, which demands scrutiny. We found that the collective intelligence field is valuable, truly interdisciplinary, and part of a paradigm shift in the social sciences. However, the content is not new, as suggested by the comparison with social intelligence, which is often uncritical and lacking in the data it shows and that the notion of the wisdom of crowds is misleading (RQ1). The study of social systems is still highly relevant for social scientists and scholars of collective intelligence as an alternative methodology to more traditional social science paradigms as found, for example, in the study of business or management (RQ2).

Individual Psychology and Grand StrategyRomancing the State

2021 ◽  
pp. 286-302
Author(s):  
Brian C. Rathbun
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Leadership Styles ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
Thinking Style ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mass Basis

Individual psychology at the both mass and elite levels is potentially relevant for grand strategy, but its impact is very difficult to establish. This chapter first reviews the epistemological challenges of showing individual agency in international politics in a way that satisfies “positivist” criteria for good social science. It then turns to how these problems are particularly pronounced for establishing how and why leaders matter for grand strategy, which likely explains why there is so little research on the subject. The piece makes the case for a turn away from the substance of grand strategy towards a focus on leadership style, introducing a distinction between realists and romantics. These two leadership styles emerge out of fundamentally different patterns of cognition: romantics are marked by their emotional, intuitive, and less procedurally rational psychology and realists by their deliberative and objective thinking style. Romantics are also better positioned, and more likely, to make the kind of appeals to public opinion that provide a mass basis for a grand strategy.

Research on Key Technology of Internet Public Sentiment

2014 ◽  
Vol 926-930 ◽  
pp. 2030-2033
Author(s):  
De Zhi An ◽  
Yun Ke
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Hot Spot ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Key Technology ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Sentiment ◽  
The Status

Public opinion research is a new internet discipline of social science and natural science. As a hot spot of public opinion research, the research on the public opinion on the Internet has attracted much attention. By analyzing the status of the research on the public opinion on the Internet in China, this paper establishes the basic framework of the research on the public opinion on the Internet. Then some key technology issues are researched in detail. Based on the method and key technology, the paper introduces the design and implement about the platform of Internet Public Sentiment. This paper is expected to have the value to apply the Internet public sentiment analysis.

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