Opinion poll results influence voting behaviour, Swiss study claims

Poor poll results influence voters Keystone-SDA

Opinion polls can influence the outcome of a referendum. A study shows that voters tend to vote against a proposal put to a referendum if they expect it to be rejected.

For his study, political scientist Oliver Strijbis, from the private Franklin University based in Sorengo in canton Ticino, conducted three surveys involving 4,000 people on three popular initiatives: the reduction in the radio and TV licence fee, the ban on fireworks, and the liability of multinationals.

Respondents were given varying amounts of information about the proposed measures’ chances of success. This revealed a ‘Titanic effect’: if respondents were told that an initiative was certain to fail, their support declined.

Conversely, there were signs of a “bandwagon effect”: if voters expected an initiative to be approved, their support increased. In the experiments, however, the effect was weak and not statistically significant. On the other hand, there was no sign of an “underdog effect”, whereby a proposal with poor prospects would ultimately be approved.

No manipulation

According to Strijbis, there is no question of manipulation.

“Manipulation would occur if a poll were falsified with the aim of achieving a specific result. I am not aware of any such case, and I know of only one poll that seriously led me to wonder whether everything was being done properly,” he told news agency Keystone-SDA.

What is essential is transparency: for every poll, the identity of the client and that of the organisation that carried it out must be clearly established. The main problem lies rather in the fact that there are relatively few opinion polls in Switzerland. It is therefore impossible to correct heavily skewed results – for example, due to statistical chance or other errors – using other polls, writes Strijbis.

The researcher offers rather disappointing advice to initiative committees whose campaign is losing ground from the very first polls: they can probably do nothing more than keep quiet about such a decline.

Under no circumstances should they attempt to mobilise additional support by raising the spectre of defeat. Launching an appeal along the lines of “our opponents are winning, we absolutely must go out and vote now’ would”, on the contrary, risk reinforcing the “Titanic effect”, the political scientist asserts.

The results of the study were published in the journal Electoral Studies.

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Translated from German, reviewed by an English Department journalist.