Pre-Election Polls, Italian Voter Preferences, and Their Study Via On-Line Campaign Simulations

This paper reports a subset of findings drawn from a national research project – entitled “Electoral Choice: Voters’ Heuristic Strategies and Information Processing” – aiming to identify the strategies that Italian voters enact in order to combine political information originating from exposure to election campaigns and information processed during social interaction, in the wider context of the Italian political system. Recently new fields of research have focused on socio-cognitive factors that affect voting choices and information search processes enacted to formulate judgments via cognitive shortcuts (or “heuristics”). In particular, this project extends the scope of the innovative voting decision model developed by Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk and adapts it to the Italian context. The voting decision model is operationalised via a “dynamic information board” simulating election campaigns tailored to observe information research strategies in which voters engage. This technique employs a controlled-environment, on-line simulation, endeavouring to reproduce a complex, realistic environment, in which the information that the voter can access changes over time. This paper, in particular, focuses on voters’ perception of pre-election polls and on polls’ role as a heuristic influencing voter choice. In the specific study here described, approximately 900 voters were asked to participate in a detailed, simulated election campaign for mayor. The fieldwork was carried out during the year 2011 and concluded in December. Among the heuristics available during the campaign, these voters were given access to pre-election polls (which respondents were free to view or not), which therefore “competed” with other sources of relevant information. A subset of voters was also exposed, during the second half of the campaign, to pre-election polls predicting the final outcome (which was unfavourable, to varying extents, for the respondent’s preferred candidate). On the whole, voters participating in our simulated election campaign displayed somewhat negative attitudes towards pre-election polls: such polls, more often than not, are deemed useless and unreliable. During the actual campaign simulation, pre-election polls were not used extensively as an information source by voters: on average, over 40% of participants ignored the polls. As regards the part of the study in which voters were “forcibly” exposed to polls that reported unfavourable predictions for their preferred candidates, again pre-election polls seemed to enjoy little traction: only one-tenth of voters switched votes, even though doing so would favour a second preferred candidate and in some cases contribute to defeating the least preferred candidate.