Do parties respond strategically to opinion polls? Evidence from campaign statements

Pereira, Miguel M.

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2019.02.014

Cited by 15 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…Timeconstrained politicians are exposed to a vast array of cues available through different channels: direct contacts from constituents, lobbyists, the media, social networks, political parties, or peers. To condense these overlapping demands is a daunting task, and the information available to legislators is often incomplete (Butler and Nickerson 2011;Gulzar, Haai, and Paudel 2020;Pereira 2019). This context offers fertile ground for the adoption of cognitive shortcuts.…”

Section: The Nature Of Elite Perceptions Of Public Opinionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and Reducing Biases in Elite Beliefs About the Electorate

Pereira

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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To be responsive, politicians have to rely on beliefs about public will. Previous research suggests that perceptions of public opinion are often distorted. However, it remains unclear (1) why reelection-seeking officials misperceive public preferences and (2) how to mitigate these distorted beliefs. I argue that misperceptions result from unequal exposure to different subconstituencies and a tendency of legislators to project their own preferences on voters. I find support for these arguments in a six-wave panel of Swedish MPs combined with mass surveys. Elite beliefs disproportionately reflect the preferences of privileged voters and the personal positions of legislators. Additionally, an experiment with Swiss representatives leveraging real political events reveals how misperceptions can be reduced by encouraging a more balanced exposure to voters. The study concludes that economic and political inequalities are rooted in elite beliefs about the electorate and reveals ways to bolster the links between voters and their representatives.

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Section: The Nature Of Elite Perceptions Of Public Opinionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and Reducing Biases in Elite Beliefs About the Electorate

Pereira

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…De este modo, la hipótesis planteada se confirma, ya que el candidato que va por detrás en las encuestas hace un mayor uso del personaje del villano, es decir, emplea una campaña más negativa, que el candidato que va por delante. Esto es coherente con otros estudios (Damore, 2002;Hassell, 2019;Nai y Sciarini, 2015;Pereira, 2019). Esta caracterización negativa se ve intensificada por las alusiones al villano específico, en una de cada diez veces, en el caso de ASN.…”

Section: Conclusionesunclassified

El storytelling de la campaña presidencial portuguesa de 2016. Rebelo de Sousa vs. Sampaio da Nóvoa

Díez

Verissimo

2020

Soc. estado.

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Resumen El objetivo de este estudio ha sido analizar el storytelling de la campaña política de los dos principales candidatos a la presidencia de Portugal en las elecciones de 2016: Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa y António Sampaio da Nóvoa. La metodología empleada ha sido el análisis de contenido de los Personajes y la Trama en sus discursos de presentación de candidatura y en las noticias sobre sus campañas en los periódicos Expresso y Público. Los resultados muestran, en el análisis de prensa escrita, una relación entre el uso del personaje del villano y las encuestas de intención de voto, una mayor referencia en ambos candidatos a la situación de equilibrio final, así como que Rebelo de Sousa basó su narrativa en el héroe, mientras que en Sampaio da Nóvoa es significativa el recurso al villano.

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“…It is known that learning about the positions of the electorate can shape the behavior of voters, and it has often been criticized for its effects on their perceptions [20,21]. is explains that, at the turn of the century, over thirty democracies around the world had embargoes on the publication of opinion polls close to the election day [8]. e success of the election campaign depends to a large extent on its ability to reformulate new information in its favor, and the way the party leaders respond to opinion polls is one of the most important pillars of this process.…”

Section: Optimal Control Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At any time, party leaders can choose to speak of candidates for their party or other election candidates, focusing on a variety of political and gender issues, depending on polling results. Voting in opinion polls can be used to balance different elements of the speech of party leaders [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling and Control of the Public Opinion: An Agree-Disagree Opinion Model

Bidah

Zakary

Rachik

2020

International Journal of Differential Equations

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In this paper, we aim to investigate optimal control to a new mathematical model that describes agree-disagree opinions during polls, which we presented and analyzed in Bidah et al., 2020. We first present the model and recall its different compartments. We formulate the optimal control problem by supplementing our model with a objective functional. Optimal control strategies are proposed to reduce the number of disagreeing people and the cost of interventions. We prove the existence of solutions to the control problem, we employ Pontryagin’s maximum principle to find the necessary conditions for the existence of the optimal controls, and Runge–Kutta forward-backward sweep numerical approximation method is used to solve the optimal control system, and we perform numerical simulations using various initial conditions and parameters to investigate several scenarios. Finally, a global sensitivity analysis is carried out based on the partial rank correlation coefficient method and the Latin hypercube sampling to study the influence of various parameters on the objective functional and to identify the most influential parameters.

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Do parties respond strategically to opinion polls? Evidence from campaign statements

Cited by 15 publications

References 64 publications

Understanding and Reducing Biases in Elite Beliefs About the Electorate

Understanding and Reducing Biases in Elite Beliefs About the Electorate

El storytelling de la campaña presidencial portuguesa de 2016. Rebelo de Sousa vs. Sampaio da Nóvoa

Modeling and Control of the Public Opinion: An Agree-Disagree Opinion Model

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