Biased polls: investigating the pressures survey respondents feel

Abstract

AbstractDemocratic bias in polls reached record highs in recent elections. The Shy Trump Voter Hypothesis claims some voters feel pressure to hide plans to vote for Trump. Despite several scholarly efforts to assess whether shy Trump voters contribute significantly to Democratic bias, the jury is still out. We undertake a thorough investigation using the longstanding, and more general, social desirability framework to consider why some survey subjects might be shy about revealing their support for any candidate. We randomly assign voters to either report the candidate they would SAY they would vote for if they wanted to make the best impression on others or the worst impression. In a new addition to this experiment, we then return to each voter with the opposite condition. Doing so allows us to investigate the causes and consequences of the social pressures voters feel when discussing which candidate they support. We show that the pressures voters feel are a function of the partisan context in which they live and we focus on voters that feel pressure to say they support a candidate other than the candidate of the party with which they identify. Although we demonstrate that cross-pressured partisans are more likely to say they intend to vote for the other party’s candidate than unpressured partisans, they occur on both sides and so polling bias created by them (should they revert to their party’s candidate in the voting booth) is likely reduced in the aggregate.