“Chris Good”:http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/07/polling_and_the_herd_mentality.php at the _Atlantic Monthly_ expands on Conor Clarke’s case (discussed by John below) against opinion polls.
bq. At the Atlantic Special Ideas Report, Conor Clarke makes a case against polling, for, among other reasons, polls’ ability to influence mass opinion by reflecting it, accurately or inaccurately, and to effect a herd mentality: … Polls illustrate, in other words, the power of perception in politics. Fatigue sets in when one’s favorite candidate is down. If he’s down ten points, why even take the trouble of voting? In that sense, polls corrupt the experiment of an election by suggesting results beforehand; for all the statistical science that goes into them, they’re fundamentally anti-scientific. And perhaps more significantly, Conor suggests, people can change their opinions to side with the front-runner.
I’m not at all sure that I buy ‘they’re fundamentally anti-scientific’ bit – elections, despite Good’s metaphor, are not experiments, and are not supposed to be. But Good’s underlying animus is, I suspect, a reasonably common one. Good believes that voters should vote on the basis of their actual preferences for candidates, rather than their perception of whether other voters support the candidate in question. Opinion polls – because they provide evidence of others’ voting intentions – make voters more likely to be swayed into voting for candidates who would not be their first choice in an ideal world.In the language of political science, voters should vote _sincerely_ rather than _strategically._
This is not a ridiculous position to hold – as the social choice literature makes clear, strategic voting can lead to all sorts of indeterminacies, possibilities for manipulation via agenda control etc. And that’s not even to get into the social psychological literature on tendencies to group conformism etc. But there is a normative case to be made for strategic voting too. Sunshine Hillygus has a “nice article”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hillygus/bjps.pdf on strategic voting in the 2000 Presidential election. She finds strong evidence that supporters of minority parties (in this case, Ralph Nader) are more likely to vote strategically, changing their vote to support the candidate closest to their own views (for the most part, Gore) who has a decent shot at winning. High information voters (as best as the data indicates) were more likely to switch support from Nader to Gore, as were voters in swing states. But clearly, a number of people did not vote strategically (according to the usual political science definition of the term) in this election, since Nader had no realistic chance of winning, instead expressing their sincere preferences for a no-hoper candidate.
bq. those supporting Nader for expressive reasons were undeterred by the wasted vote appeal, and were the most likely to remain loyal. These voters might not be voting so as to alter the outcome but instead to send a message or signal. For these Nader supporters, they might consider their vote to be much like cheering for their favourite team in the stadium. If a voter views the vote as an end in itself, then there is little reason to respond strategically to the electoral environment.
Nader’s vote, as is well known, collapsed in the 2004 presidential election. There are many possible explanations for this collapse. But casual empiricism would suggest that one plausible reason why left-leaning 2000 Nader voters were unlikely to vote for him again in 2004 was that they felt they were badly burned by the 2000 experience – what had seemed like a good opportunity to signal their sincere preferences turned out to have momentous consequences for the governance of the country. This is, of course, highly unlikely to have been the only reason for the precipitous drop in support for Nader, but it does suggest that sincere voting may have its downside in a winner-take-all electoral system. And opinion polls – by providing information on who is likely to win or to lose (especially in multiple candidate primaries and the like) can allow voters to cast their votes in more efficacious ways.