IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/statpp/v8y2017i1p1-12n1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Representativity of Election Polls

Author

Listed:
  • Bethlehem Jelke

    (Leiden University, Institute of Political Science, Leiden, The Netherlands)

Abstract

Election polls are conducted in many countries during election campaigns. Provided such polls are set up and carried out correctly, they can give an accurate indication of the voting intentions of people. However, the last couple of years these polls seem to be less able to predict election results. Examples are the polls for the general election in the UK of 2015, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and the presidential election in the US of 2016. The polls in the UK and the US have all in common that they are either telephone polls or online polls. It is shown in this paper that both type of polls suffer from lack of representativity. The compositions of their samples differ from that of the population. This can have several causes. For telephone polls, problems are mainly caused by increasing nonresponse rates, and lack of proper sampling frames. Most online polls are based on samples from web panels that are recruited by means of self-selection instead of random samples. Such web panels also not representative. The paper analyses the shortcomings of these election polls. The problems are illustrated by describing the polls in the UK and the US in some more detail.

Suggested Citation

  • Bethlehem Jelke, 2017. "The Representativity of Election Polls," Statistics, Politics and Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-12, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:8:y:2017:i:1:p:1-12:n:1
    DOI: 10.1515/spp-2016-0002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2016-0002
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1515/spp-2016-0002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:8:y:2017:i:1:p:1-12:n:1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.