ECON-A3000 - Principles of Empirical Analysis, Lecture, 10.1.2022-21.2.2022
This course space end date is set to 21.02.2022 Search Courses: ECON-A3000
Pre-class exercise 2
The Failure of Election Polls
Pre-Class Exercise 2
In the end of our second lecture, we will discuss how researchers make inference about a population by taking random samples of this population. It is a powerful tool, but like all tools, one has to be aware of what could go wrong. One example that we will discuss in class is the failure of pre-election polls to predict the election results of the 2016 and 2020 American presidential elections.
In order to facilitate discussion, I ask you to read an article “One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong” published in the news website Vox. Based on the article, submit a short summary through MyCourses that answers the following questions:
- How do pollsters traditionally deal with the fact that people who reply to polls tend to be different than the population at large?
- When does the traditional approach work? When does it fail?
- What is the explanation David Shor suggests for the recent failures of the American polls?
Please recall that the idea of this exercise is just to give structure for your preparation, so please do not spend too much time in polishing your summaries. Evaluation will be on pass/fail basis. You can submit your summary through MyCourses "Assignments" section, and there is a hard deadline 15 minutes before the start of the class.
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Link to the article: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/11/10/21551766/election-polls-results-wrong-david-shor.
Voluntary: In case you’d like to read more about why polling matters, you might want start with this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/polling-catastrophe/616986/