The impact of exposure to pre-election polls on voting behaviour

This article explores Italian voters’ perception of pre-election polls and the latter’s influence on voter choice. Approximately 900 voters were asked to participate in an online simulated election campaign implemented within the voting decision model developed by Richard Lau and David Redlawsk. Voters were given access to, among other heuristics, pre-election polls; a subset of voters was also exposed to polls predicting the final outcome. Findings concern voters’ perceptions of pre-election polls’ reliability and usefulness and the impact of polls on voters after they have viewed survey findings suggesting that their preferred candidates will lose. On the whole, voters participating in the simulated election campaign displayed somewhat negative attitudes towards pre-election polls: such polls, more often than not, were deemed useless and unreliable. As regards the part of the study in which some voters were forcibly exposed to polls that reported unfavourable predictions for their preferred candidates, only one-tenth of voters switched votes: not many, if one considers that such voters had a good incentive to switch, but often more than enough to decide an election.