home
Home
navigate_next
Search results
Search results
Abstract
This Study discusses the differences between journalists and political scientists while observing and predicting elections, and examines whether there are discrepancies between the media's schema and the public's interest during campaign. Overall speaking, political scientists are able to predict or explain voting behavior months before the election, using demographic variables such as partisanship, unification/independence stance, ethnic identity, gender, and age with considerable stability and accuracy (Lewis-Beck and Rice, 1992; Rosenstone, 1983). However, from the perspective of media report, candidates' support ratings rise and fall along with campaign strategies and news events, public opinion seems to be variable and difficult to predict. Therefore, this article would like to first provide a plausible explanation to the above dilemma. Subsequently, the author would like to examine the media focus during campaign to see if their coverage reflects the issues people deem important. Empirical data shows that the media operates on its own logic, and there is a considerable gap between media campaign coverage and the issues people care most about.
Abstract
Opinion poll has been the most widely used way to conduct election prediction. However, recently prediction market has become another widely applied prediction mechanism, attracting the literature to compare the accuracy of the two prediction methods. According to trading data of the Exchange of Future Events and opinion polls collected by this study, this paper analyzes the prediction results of the 2009 magistrate and mayoral election in Taiwan, and compares the prediction accuracies on this election between prediction markets and poll institutions. What this paper finds are: for prediction contracts on election winners, the weighted average prices of prediction markets are positive and statistically significant on the ratio of winning elections and can be regarded as the candidates' probability of winning elections. In addition, based upon five indicators of correctness rate, precision rate, hit rate, false alarm rate and Kuipers score, predictive power of prediction markets on election winners is obviously higher than that of poll institutions. For prediction on vote shares, predictive power of prediction markets is higher than that of poll institutions within 20 days before the election, and prediction accuracy of prediction markets is getting higher along with approaching the expiration of the contracts. Nevertheless, we also agree that opinion survey can help researchers conduct covariance analysis, which can be used together with prediction market to reinforce the findings of each other.
