Can biased polls distort electoral results? Evidence from the lab

Boukouras, Aristotelis, Jennings, William, Li, Lunzheng and Maniadis, Zacharias (2023) Can biased polls distort electoral results? Evidence from the lab. European Journal of Political Economy, 78, [102383]. (doi:10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2023.102383).

Record type: Article

Abstract

We introduce a new methodological approach for studying the effect of biased
polls on election outcomes and apply it to a set of new experiments with 375 participants. Voters may observe and learn about the bias by playing multiple voting rounds. While in control conditions, polls are unbiased, in treatment conditions, participants view only poll results where a particular candidate’s vote share is the largest. This candidate is consistently elected more often in the treatments than in the controls, because biased polls robustly distort voters’ expectations about vote shares. This effect holds after eighteen election rounds, out of which the first three are practice rounds, but somewhat more weakly in our main treatment where voters are explicitly informed about the bias.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 1 March 2023

e-pub ahead of print date: 5 March 2023

Published date: June 2023

Additional Information: Funding Information: We are greatly indebted to Daniel Zizzo, John Hey and Alexandros Karakostas for their support and assistance. This work was supported by BA/Leverhulme small grant SG162362 and the project “SInnoPSis” funded by Horizon 2020 under grant agreement ID: 857636 . We would like to thank David K. Levine, Adriana Bunea, Philippos Louis, David Rahman, Joel Sobel, Erik Gahner Larsen, seven anonymous referees, seminar participants at the Universities of Portsmouth, Southampton, Leicester, King’s College London, as well as participants at the Second Cherry Blossom Workshop on Experimental Economics in Wuhan, China; the 2018 and 2019 CRETE conferences in Tinos, Greece; the 2018 Workshop on Perceptions and Public Policies, Bar Ilan, Israel, the 2019 Cyprus Meeting on Behaviours and Algorithms, Cyprus, and the Central European Programme on Economic Theory 2019, Italy. Funding Information: We are greatly indebted to Daniel Zizzo, John Hey and Alexandros Karakostas for their support and assistance. This work was supported by BA/Leverhulme small grant SG162362 and the project “SInnoPSis” funded by Horizon 2020 under grant agreement ID: 857636. We would like to thank David K. Levine, Adriana Bunea, Philippos Louis, David Rahman, Joel Sobel, Erik Gahner Larsen, seven anonymous referees, seminar participants at the Universities of Portsmouth, Southampton, Leicester, King's College London, as well as participants at the Second Cherry Blossom Workshop on Experimental Economics in Wuhan, China; the 2018 and 2019 CRETE conferences in Tinos, Greece; the 2018 Workshop on Perceptions and Public Policies, Bar Ilan, Israel, the 2019 Cyprus Meeting on Behaviours and Algorithms, Cyprus, and the Central European Programme on Economic Theory 2019, Italy. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors

Keywords: Beliefs, Biased polls, Lab experiment, Voting