In a previous post, I wrote that undecided voters may be influenced by a less-obvious bit of persuasion - the momentum of a narrative, the apparent shift in a candidate's prospects from one day to the next, the poll-based stories that no news team can resist. Given a choice, all other things apparently being equal, who wouldn't want to back a winner?
I had this in mind when I came across a new study by Andreas Graefe, a German forecasting guru who found that one tool for predicting election outcomes has been largely overlooked in recent decades, despite it's astounding accuracy: the voter expectation survey. Rather than asking people who they intend to vote for, these surveys ask, "Who do you think is going to win?" Graefe looked at 190 of them conducted between 1932 and 2008 and found them to be 91 percent accurate. Looking at the six elections between 1988 to 2008, voter expectation surveys did better at predicting the winner than polls, prediction markets, econometric models, and the judgment of pooled experts).
Despite this record, Graefe doesn't think we should neglect those other forecasting methods. Better to combine them all into one -- thereby canceling out the biases and shortcomings of each. He and some colleagues have done this with an election forecasting model they call PollyVote. In a 2011 study of the model, Graefe and colleagues looked at daily forecasts for 100 days prior to each of the five elections between 1992 and 2008 made by polls, econometric models, the Iowa Electronic Markets (prediction market established at the University of Iowa), and PollyVote. On average, PollyVote reduced the error in forecasts at least 30 percent, except when compared to the 7-day average of the IEM, where it did about 8 percent worse. However, PollyVote did better than IEM in daily predictions of who would win: PollyVote predicted the winner on 96 of the 100 days, on average, compared to 76 by IEM. In case you're wondering, PollyVote has projected Barack Obama winning at least 51 percent of the popular vote every day this year and never gone above 52.5 percent. Try to make a narrative out of that. Boring!
If you've slogged this far, here's your video reward, featuring John Antonakis, a psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is predicting the presidential election with something he calls the charismometer. Simplified, it is the index of "Charismatic Leadership Tactics" (CLTs) used by the presidential candidates in their nomination acceptance speeches. There are 12 CLTs, such as using metaphors, drawing contrasts, asking rhetorical questions, and utilizing gestures. And, according to Antonakis, this is precisely the sort of election -- where the economic picture is muddled and voters aren't sure whether to punish or reward the incumbent party -- when charisma really matters. According to the charismometer, Obama will prevail. I'll let Antonakis explain:
I had this in mind when I came across a new study by Andreas Graefe, a German forecasting guru who found that one tool for predicting election outcomes has been largely overlooked in recent decades, despite it's astounding accuracy: the voter expectation survey. Rather than asking people who they intend to vote for, these surveys ask, "Who do you think is going to win?" Graefe looked at 190 of them conducted between 1932 and 2008 and found them to be 91 percent accurate. Looking at the six elections between 1988 to 2008, voter expectation surveys did better at predicting the winner than polls, prediction markets, econometric models, and the judgment of pooled experts).
Despite this record, Graefe doesn't think we should neglect those other forecasting methods. Better to combine them all into one -- thereby canceling out the biases and shortcomings of each. He and some colleagues have done this with an election forecasting model they call PollyVote. In a 2011 study of the model, Graefe and colleagues looked at daily forecasts for 100 days prior to each of the five elections between 1992 and 2008 made by polls, econometric models, the Iowa Electronic Markets (prediction market established at the University of Iowa), and PollyVote. On average, PollyVote reduced the error in forecasts at least 30 percent, except when compared to the 7-day average of the IEM, where it did about 8 percent worse. However, PollyVote did better than IEM in daily predictions of who would win: PollyVote predicted the winner on 96 of the 100 days, on average, compared to 76 by IEM. In case you're wondering, PollyVote has projected Barack Obama winning at least 51 percent of the popular vote every day this year and never gone above 52.5 percent. Try to make a narrative out of that. Boring!
If you've slogged this far, here's your video reward, featuring John Antonakis, a psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is predicting the presidential election with something he calls the charismometer. Simplified, it is the index of "Charismatic Leadership Tactics" (CLTs) used by the presidential candidates in their nomination acceptance speeches. There are 12 CLTs, such as using metaphors, drawing contrasts, asking rhetorical questions, and utilizing gestures. And, according to Antonakis, this is precisely the sort of election -- where the economic picture is muddled and voters aren't sure whether to punish or reward the incumbent party -- when charisma really matters. According to the charismometer, Obama will prevail. I'll let Antonakis explain:
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UPDATE! The New York Times picks up on the prescience of voter expectations: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/us/politics/a-better-poll-question-to-predict-the-election.html?ref=politics
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