Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public
Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public
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DOI：
10.1086/708682
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发表时间：
2020-10-01
影响因子：
3.1
通讯作者：
Lelkes, Yphtach
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Westwood, Sean Jeremy;Messing, Solomon;Lelkes, Yphtach
近年来，美国选举的赛马报道发生了巨大变化-将焦点从最新的民意调查数字转移到强调候选人获胜机会的复杂元分析预测。政治信息环境的这种变化会影响选举结果吗？我们用实验表明，预测增加了对选举结果的确定性，混淆了许多，并降低了投票率。此外，我们发现，选举预测在媒体中变得突出，特别是在自由派受众的媒体中，并表明这种报道往往会更强烈地影响领先的候选人，从而引发人们对他们是否有助于特朗普战胜克林顿的问题。我们为这个问题带来了经验证据，使用美国国家选举研究数据表明，民主党人和独立人士对2016年决定性的选举结果表示出不同寻常的信心，而同样的信心与较低的投票率有关。
Recent years have seen a dramatic change in horse-race coverage of elections in the United States-shifting focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that emphasize candidates' chance of victory. Could this shift in the political information environment affect election outcomes? We use experiments to show that forecasting increases certainty about an election's outcome, confuses many, and decreases turnout. Furthermore, we show that election forecasting has become prominent in the media, particularly in outlets with liberal audiences, and show that such coverage tends to more strongly affect the candidate who is ahead-raising questions about whether they contributed to Trump's victory over Clinton in 2016. We bring empirical evidence to this question, using American National Election Studies data to show that Democrats and Independents expressed unusual confidence in a decisive 2016 election outcome-and that the same measure of confidence is associated with lower reported turnout.