As the 2000 election so vividly showed, it is Electoral College standings rather than national popular votes that determine who becomes President. But current pre-election polls focus almost exclusively on the popular vote. Here we present a method by which pollsters can achieve both point estimates and margins of error for a presidential candidate’s electoral-vote total. We use data from both ...

Abstract. Indonesian public opinion surveys consistently underestimate support for five mid-sized parties: PKB, PKS, NasDem, PAN, and PPP. This paper explores whether this consistent underestimation is the result of social desirability bias, late decisions or mobilization, candidate-driven voter preferences, sampling design. I find some evidence that parties with stronger mobilization networks ...

This paper summarizes the results of the CNS Summit Data Quality Monitoring Workgroup analysis of current data quality monitoring techniques used in central nervous system (CNS) clinical trials. Based on audience polls conducted at the CNS Summit 2014, the panel determined that current techniques used to monitor data and quality in clinical trials are broad, uncontrolled, and lack independent v...

In this paper, we consider lightweight decentralised algorithms for achieving consensus in distributed systems. Each member of a distributed group has a private value from a fixed set consisting of, say, two elements, and the goal is for all members to reach consensus on the majority value. We explore variants of the voter model applied to this problem. In the voter model, each node polls a ran...

OBJECTIVE To review the results of opinion polls on community attitudes to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other aspects of assisted reproductive technology over a 20-year period. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Fourteen Australia-wide interview surveys that included questions relating to IVF were carried out between July 1981 and November 2001 as part of regular Morgan polls of community a...

Policy-makers often rely on public opinion polls to decide which political projects to pursue. We study how the use of opinion polls influences policy outcomes if respondents feel pressured to offer ”socially desirable” views when answering the pollsters’ questions. Our results indicate that this type of social pressure can lead to second-best policy outcomes even if politicians are aware of th...

In the last years Spanish politics have transitioned from bipartidism to multipartidism. This change led to an unstable situation which finally evolved to the rare scenario of two general elections in the period of six months. The two elections had a main difference: two important left-wing parties formed a coalition in the second election while they had run separately in the first one. In the ...

Public opinion polls consistently show that a growing majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Critics, however, raise the possibility that these polls are plagued by social desirability bias, and thereby may overstate public support for gay and lesbian rights. We test this proposition using a list experiment embedded in the 2013 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. List experiment...