Here’s a thought experiment. You’re a Coakley supporter in MA, and you feel like neither the candidate nor your fellow Democrats are taking the election seriously because everyone believes she’ll win by a large margin. A pollster calls you and asks you for whom you are planning on voting. What should you say? You could tell the truth and say Coakley, and risk yet another poll that shows her with a big lead and risks lulling Democrats even further into complacency. Or you could say Brown, in the hope that a closer than expected poll would light a fire under your co-partisans and/or convince some people who are planning on voting for Brown to “make a statement” because they think he has no choice of winning to avoid doing so.
This got me thinking: do we, as political scientists, really have a good handle on why and when people tend to tell the truth to pollsters? Much has been made of building up and tearing down the so-called “Bradley effect”:https://themonkeycage.org/2008/11/truths_and_myths_about_the_200.html, whereby whites voters _might_ be less likely to admit to voting against black candidates. We also know from Adam Berinsky’s work in particular that sometimes certain voters are unable to articulate positions that they probably hold (see for example “here”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7757.html or “here”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jat7/Berinsky_Tucker_CPCS_2006.pdf). But what about situations like the one above, where it would serve the partisan interest of the respondent to lie about her intended vote choice? Or, to give another example, Adam Meirowitz and I have a formalized argument about why certain poll respondents ought to exaggerate their positions on policy positions (see the section entitled _Intuition_ “here”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jat7/Meirowitz_Tucker_2007.pdf; for more generalizable formal work on this topic by Meirowitz see “here”:http://www.princeton.edu/~ameirowi/geb2005.pdf.)
Yet at the end of the day, we usually do seem to be able to predict most election results from the final set of polls before that election, which suggests people aren’t systematically lying in election polls. I’m not sure if we have any similar findings in terms of policy questions, but I certainly have never seen systematic evidence suggesting they do. So this seems to be an interesting puzzle: if people ought to lie to pollsters to advance their own political agenda, why don’t they? I posed this question to my colleague “Neal Beck”:http://as.nyu.edu/object/nathanielbeck.html, and his guess was essentially that people who answer surveys want to get off the phone as quickly as possible, and putting any thought into answering a survey question would slow down that process. I’m curious as to what other people think. Why don’t people lie more often to pollsters? In my piece with Meirowitz, we raise the idea of a “small psychic cost” to lying, but why should that kind of psychic cost be any more troubling than, for example, not voting for your preferred candidate in an election for strategic reasons? Could it be that people don’t think politicians look at poll results? That seems overly naive. We could of course fall back on the “what would one different response matter?” argument, but we know that people vote strategically; certainly one strategic poll respondent out of 1000 can have a larger impact than one strategic voter out of a million.
Anyone aware of empirical research on these or related topics? Perhaps from the political pysch literature?
