We develop a formal model of opinion polls in elections and study how they influence the voting behaviour of the participating agents, and thereby election outcomes. This approach is particularly relevant to the study of collective decision making by means of voting in multiagent systems, where it is reasonable to assume that we can precisely model the amount of information available to agents ...

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...

How do polls influence strategic voting under proportional representation? This paper derives a strategic calculus of voting for coalitions that generates testable predictions about the effects of polls on strategic voting in elections involving four or more parties. Incentives of leftist voters to vote for a centrist over a noncentrist party are shown to increase with the difference in expecte...

This paper analyses changes in public opinion by tracking political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online. Unlike polls or surveys, our approach does not elicit opinions but approximates what the public thinks by analysing the discussions in which they decide to take part. We measure the emotional content of online discussions in three dimensions (valence, arousal and dominance)...

Polls are used by politicians, voters, and businesspeople alike to form expectations over political outcomes. In an electoral system with ‘pork’ at the national level, local economic prospects will be a direct function of political support. Because every poll comes with its margin of error, we can exploit the error in sub-national polls to test for whether forward-looking investment in the econ...

Election forecasts have traditionally been based on representative polls, in which randomly sampled individuals are asked for whom they intend to vote. While representative polling has historically proven to be quite effective, it comes at considerable financial and time costs. Moreover, as response rates have declined over the past several decades, the statistical benefits of representative sa...

Political stock markets (PSM) are sometimes seen as substitutes for opinion polls. On the bases of a behavioral model, specific preconditions were drawn out under which manipulation in PSM can weaken this argument. Evidence for manipulation is reported from the data of two separate PSM during the Berlin 99 state elections. JEL Classification: C93, D4, G1