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...

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 ...

Doodle is a simple and popular online system for scheduling events. It is an implementation of the approval voting mechanism, where candidates are the time slots and each responder approves a subset of the slots. We analyze all the Doodle polls created in the US from JulySeptember 2011 (over 340,000 polls), consisting of both hidden polls (where you cannot see other people’s votes) and open pol...

Political polls achieve their results by sampling a small number of potential voters rather than the population as a whole. This leads to “sampling error” which most polling agencies dutifully report. But factors such as nonrepresentative samples, question wording and nonresponse can produce non-sampling errors. While pollsters are aware of such errors, they are difficult to quantify and seldom...

The purpose of this study is to examine the degree of participation in online polls and its relationship to the perception of online polls, information literacy, and the political efficacy of Internet users in mainland China. Data was gathered online from a sample of 419 Internet users. Results show that perceptions of both the usefulness and trustworthiness of online polls positively correlate...

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...

While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the polls as an accurate election predictor? Polls from several news outlet and sentiment analysis on Twitter data were used, in conjunction with the results of...

We use laboratory experiments to test for one of the foundations of the rational voter paradigm —that voters respond to probabilities of being pivotal. We exploit a setup that entails stark theoretical effects of information concerning the preference distribution (as revealed through polls) on costly participation decisions. The data reveal several insights. First, voting propensity increases s...

From IPSM’s data in 1988, Forsythe and his colleagues proved that even though there were substantial judgment bias, Iowa Political Stock Market worked quite well in the sense that its estimation of presidential candidates’ popular vote share surprisingly close, much better than the forecasts of opinion-polls. They explained that the judgment bias only referred to average traders, but market pri...

In this paper, an experiment was conducted to assess the impact of online deliberation on citizens’ attitudes. Specifically, this research compared pre and post deliberation opinions of participants who deliberated online via an asynchronous platform regarding the issue of political opinion polls. Results indicate that online deliberation had a positive effect on citizens’ attitudes since it wa...