A potential Swedish membership in the third stage of the EMU (the currency union) will be determined in a referendum. The opinion polls preceding this referendum show strong variability in the Swedish public opinion over the last four years. In this paper I derive a simple theoretical model and test it empirically to establish the economic factors driving the opinion. I find that an increase in...

Its fair to say that when it comes to global entities that matter to us, we are quite obsessed with finding out what other people think about them. In the past, querying people’s opinions with respect to a global entity such as Michael Jackson, Microsoft or Cuba was done through user polls funded by organizations and only a small percentage of these questionable polls trickled to the average pe...

While drivers are not expected to vote while driving, VANETs can be an excellent media for dissemination of decentralized regional polls and for prerecorded votes/opinions on regional issues in a decentralized opinion poll. We propose and evaluate heuristics for scheduling messages in a VANET broadcastingbased dissemination of decentralized opinion polling data among self-interested participant...

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...

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...

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...

The rise of smart mobile devices created new opportunities for electronic and mobile participation. These devices provide means to sense the current environment citizens are situated in, which can be then used to carry out targeted opinion polls. The context-aware polling system FlashPoll takes advantage of this notion and enables the conduct of short and fast context-specific polls which are m...