Excited to share our new paper in @thejop.bsky.social with @krausewe.bsky.social! Parties polling just below an electoral threshold are far less likely to clear it: a self-fulfilling prophecy that diminishes when polls communicate uncertainty. 🗳️📊
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
New paper out in the @thejop.bsky.social (w/ @christinagahn.bsky.social)
Do opinion polls shape election results?
Using both cross-national data and a survey experiment, the answer we find is yes - though it depends on how we communicate polling results.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Less than 1 week left to apply for this exciting postdoc opportunity ⬇️ @kathleenbeckers.bsky.social & I look forward to receiving applications 😀
The key takeaway is in our opinion not that polls should be restricted or banned.
But how we report them matters a lot.
We are grateful for feedback from many colleagues along the way, and to the AUTNES team and our research assistants for their excellent support.
Whether a party clears the electoral threshold critically influences which voices are heard in parliament and, sometimes, in government.
We study what happens to parties hovering right around that line in the polls - drawing on 1,095 party-polling estimates across 142 elections in 25 countries.
Using an RDD, we find that parties polling just *below* the threshold are substantially less likely to clear it on election day than those just *above*.
That gap is too large to be explained by polling accuracy alone.
This shows that polls do not just measure voter preferences - they shape them.
This effect, however, weakens if polling uncertainty is clearly communicated to voters.
Using a survey experiment conducted in Austria, we show that visualizing party-specific margins of error significantly increases vote intentions for parties polling just below the threshold.
New paper w/ @lstoetze.bsky.social "Estimating Treatment Effects on Proportions with Synthetic Controls" out in @polanalysis.bsky.social 👀
When your outcomes are compositional (such as vote shares), applying synthetic controls separately to each part can break the math. We show how to fix it: 🧵
🚨 What happens with voters when politicians use simpler language?
New @thejop.bsky.social paper with @rsenninger.bsky.social: simple language changes not just what citizens understand, but who they think politicians are.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Voters for extreme right protest parties have lower levels of subjective well-being, @stevendekeyser.bsky.social, @dieterstiers.bsky.social and I show in a new article in Journal of Happiness Studies @isqols.bsky.social . The effect, however, is almost fully mediated by anti-immigrant sentimens.