Voters overrate favorite candidates
Despite poll results, voters expect their preferred political candidates to win elections
2012-02-24
(Press-News.org) EVANSTON, Ill. --- If your political candidate of choice falls behind in the polls, will you lose faith in his ability to win? Probably not. A new study from Northwestern University suggests that people tend to believe that their preferred candidate will win an election, no matter what the polls predict.
The study was published Feb. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
"People thought their preferred candidate had a higher chance of winning, in every election, no matter in which state they live, no matter who was running, no matter which political party," said Charles F. Manski, co-author of the paper. "This is one of the strongest empirical regularities I've ever seen."
Manski is the Board of Trustees Professor in Economics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. Adeline Delavande from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex is a co-author of the paper.
"It appears that Americans, despite having access to the same publicly available information, nevertheless inhabit disparate perceptual worlds," Manski said.
For example, someone who strongly supports a Democrat candidate over a Republican will give a 20 to 30 percent higher chance, on average, that the Democrat would win the election than would someone who strongly supports the Republican.
Manski said that the findings are consistent with a psychological phenomenon called the false consensus effect, in which people project their own preferences onto others.
Previous studies on the false consensus effect have focused on topics in which there exists little or no public information about social preferences. In presidential and statewide elections there is considerable common knowledge of social preferences from poll data, Manski said.
The authors used data from the American Life Panel, an online survey that has been administered to several thousand adult Americans by the RAND Corporation, a policy research nonprofit. They analyzed survey responses collected around the 2008 U.S. presidential election and 2010 senatorial and gubernatorial state elections.
Regardless of gender and level of schooling, people tended to favor the electoral chances of their preferred candidate. The effect was equally strong among white and black respondents. Also, when individuals changed their candidate preferences over time, their expectations of election outcomes changed similarly.
"Many researchers are trying to understand why people vote and how they vote," Manski said. "The false consensus effect might influence voting behavior."
INFORMATION: END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2012-02-24
WASHINGTON – Impulsive children with attention problems tend to play more video games, while kids in general who spend lots of time video gaming may also develop impulsivity and attention difficulties, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
"This is an important finding because most research on attention problems has focused on biological and genetic factors rather than on environmental factors," said Douglas A. Gentile, PhD, of Iowa State University and lead author of the study published this week in the debut issue of APA's journal ...
2012-02-24
The latest edition of Brandworkz, Version 5.0 is to be revealed at marketing technology exhibition, TFM&A at Earls Court 2, London on 28 & 29 February.
Brandworkz brand management technology is further strengthened with this major release. Brandworkz 5.0 gives brand and marketing managers more tools than ever before to manage their brands efficiently, increase brand consistency and grow their businesses. With new features integrated with existing modules in the software such as Digital Asset Management, the package is now second to none.
Powerful new features ...
2012-02-24
Obesity can be a dangerous risk to our physical health, but according to a Tel Aviv University researcher, avoiding the gym can also take a toll on our mental health, leading to depression and greater burnout rates at work.
Dr. Sharon Toker of TAU's Recanati Faculty of Management, working with Dr. Michal Biron from the University of Haifa, discovered that employees who found the time to engage in physical activity were less likely to experience a deterioration of their mental health, including symptoms of burnout and depression. The best benefits were achieved among ...
2012-02-24
BEER-SHEVA, Israel, February 23, 2012 – A new study on the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among firefighters in Israel indicates that approximately 90 percent show some form of full or partial symptoms.
According to the study by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Dr. Marc Lougassi, a firefighter himself, 24 percent of active firefighters in Israel suffer from full PTSD, 67 percent display partial PTSD while only nine percent showed no symptoms.
PTSD can occur after exposure to serious injury to oneself or another, or another's death and then ...
2012-02-24
Sometimes knowing that a new technology works is not enough. You also must know why it works to get marketplace acceptance. New information from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)* about how layered switching devices for novel computer memory systems work, for example, may now allow these structures to come to market sooner, helping bring about faster, lower-powered computers.
Switches based on transition-metal oxides have great potential as memory devices that retain their information even when the power is turned off. One type is made by stacking ...
2012-02-24
A new study published in the American Journal of Transplantation reveals that cigarette smoke exposure, in a cause-effect manner, results in graft rejection that would have been prevented by certain drug treatments.
Led by Zhenhua Dai, MD, PhD, of the University of Texas Health Science Center, researchers used mouse transplant models to investigate the impact of second hand smoke (SHS) on transplant survival and its mechanism of action.
Seven to eight mice per group were exposed to SHS and treated with or without immunoregulatory agents. They were exposed to SHS 4 weeks ...
2012-02-24
Washington, D.C. –Today the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues posted on its website, www.bioethics.gov, hundreds of supporting documents related to its investigation into the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) studies conducted in Guatemala in the 1940s. The documents include a spreadsheet that Commission staff painstakingly created to document the research subjects in Guatemala. In addition, the Commission has posted a Spanish translation of its report, "Ethically Impossible" STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948.
As the world is now aware, ...
2012-02-24
San Diego, Calif. – Beyond the personal tragedy of chronic alcoholism there is heartbreak in the biological sense, too. Scientists know severe alcoholism stresses the heart and that mitochondria, the cellular energy factories, are especially vulnerable to dysfunction. But they don't know the precise mechanism.
Now new experiments led by a team at the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health in Albany, and Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, may provide insights into possible modes of heart damage from alcohol. The teams will present their findings ...
2012-02-24
BOSTON, MA—Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have published findings that question the reliability of a new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) quality measure. The study, "Assessment of Medicare's Imaging Efficiency Measure for Emergency Department Patients With Atraumatic Headache" finds that the CMS measure—an attempt to reduce computed tomography (CT) scans in emergency departments (ED)—does not accurately determine which hospitals are performing CT scans inappropriately.
The study is electronically published in the February 23, 2012 issue ...
2012-02-24
HUNTSVILLE, TX (2/23/12) – A Sam Houston State University professor is working on a series of studies that examine the effects of race and ethnicity on state and federal sentencing outcomes, including incarceration and sentence length decisions.
In his most recent research published online by Justice Quarterly, Dr. Travis Franklin, an Assistant Professor at the College of Criminal Justice, studied the sentencing of Native American offenders in federal courts. Using data from the United States Sentencing Commission for the years 2006-2008, he found that Native Americans, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Voters overrate favorite candidates
Despite poll results, voters expect their preferred political candidates to win elections
