This study examines the role of perceptions of opinion polls in assessing media performance in the 2010 midterm elections using data collected in a southern state. Results show strong hostile media effect in viewing the favorability of the polls and the third-person effect in assessing the impact of the polls on others and oneself. Moreover, results indicate that the influence of hostile polls ...

In this article, we examine the relationship between metrics documenting politics-related Twitter activity with election results and trends in opinion polls. Various studies have proposed the possibility of inferring public opinion based on digital trace data collected on Twitter and even the possibility to predict election results based on aggregates of mentions of political actors. Yet, a sys...

How best to predict Australian federal election results? This article analyses three forecasting tools – opinion polls, economic models, and betting odds. Historically, we find that opinion polls taken close to the election are quite accurate, while economic models provide better medium-run forecasts. The 2001 election largely follows this pattern, although the economic models provided more acc...

This paper presents an experimental study of the effects of polls on voters’ welfare. The analysis shows that polls have a different effect on closely divided and lopsided divided electorates. The data show that in closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information on the voters’ distribution of preferences significantly raises the participation of subject...

Opinion Polls can be used as a means to reach weak agreement, an idea introduced by the LOCKSS system [1]. In this paper, we investigate a set of protocols that achieve data resilience for the long-term using a peer-to-peer network, where mutually untrusted peers are loosely organized. Peers use Opinion Polls to heal corrupted copies of data items instead of conventional methods that use consen...

Forecasting opinion trends from real-time social media is the long-standing goal of modern-day big-data analytics. Despite its importance, there has been no conclusive scientific evidence so far that social media activity can capture the opinion of the general population at large. Here we develop analytic tools combining statistical physics of complex networks, percolation theory, natural langu...

In a referendum conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) on June 23, 2016, $51.6\%$ of the participants voted to leave the European Union (EU). The outcome of this referendum had major policy and financial impact for both UK and EU, and was seen as a surprise because the predictions consistently indicate that the ``Remain'''' would get a majority. In this paper, we investigate whether the outcome o...