As I followed the last two elections I noticed (and I'm sure a lot of other people noticed) that the majority of the prediction polls underestimated the amount of the popular vote and electoral votes that Trump would receive. One of the hypothesis set forth to explain this is the existence of the 'shy Trump voter'. These are people who are reluctant to openly state their political ideology or candidate preferences.
When it comes to expressing your political opinions there are some costs that you can incur. Family, friends, and even strangers may judge you. This could result in marginalization, slandering, or exclusion. Because of this the cost to expressing political ideology could outweigh the potential benefits for Trump voters as in the past 4-6 years Republican voters or Trump supporters have been labeled as racist, sexist, homophobic, and hateful.
As Caplan explains; when the price of behaving ideologically rises then the amount of ideological behavior falls. Furthermore, we know that that the point at which the cost of behaving ideologically is the lowest is in the voting booth. This is because each individual vote has an extremely low probability of affecting the election thus there is a low cost to the rest of society if the voter behaves ideologically. I believe there is another reason why the cost is lowest here and it is because the cost to the individual is lowest. They can express themself openly without the fear of judgement or repercussions from other people. Because of this the prediction polls, especially those held over the phone where the respondent could be overheard, did not correctly assess the support for Trump. One article states that Republican voters were 6% less likely to say they supported Trump when interviewed over the phone versus online thus adding credibility to the claim that shy Trump voters exist. The result was that the results of the election were wildly different from the predictions since voters could behave ideologically in the booth but not in society.
No comments:
Post a Comment