La organización de los conocimientos del tema en la mente de los escritores

Polls and elections have an interconnected relationship and it is hard to imag- ine an election campaign without polls. “Poll numbers provide fodder for media coverage and election predictions, they shape candidate and voter behaviour, and they are the basis of interpreting the meaning of election outcomes” (Hillygus 2011). Since the 1960s, polls have been important for the campaign strategy especially for determining the issues to emphasize because they are very important for voters and for identifying the persuadable voters. For instance, Eisinger (2003) pointed out that polls were an integral part of the US presidential campaign because they provided a reading of public opinion which was independent of the media and political parties.

party or coalition achieving the largest number of votes nationally would, if they had not achieved it already, automatically be given of 340 of the 630 seats. Arrangements for the Senate were to be essentially the same with the significant difference that both the exclusion threshold and its majority premium would be applied region by region.

Gelman and King (1993) confirmed that the predictive accuracy of polls close to Election Day is related to actual voting because they are able to record observable political behaviour and, therefore, provide information on the fundamentals of the campaign.

Therefore, why is the importance of polls growing over election campaigns? The answer to this question is challenging. Scholars have pointed out that especially the US presidential election outcomes in particular are predictable over the campaign at one point at least (Gelman and King 1993, Cambell 2008). Although the electoral outcomes may change from one election to the next, at some point the level of support among voters tends to align as expected on Election Days. Ascertaining voters sentiment allows us to explain the ‘fundamentals’ of election campaigns. “The function of a campaign is, then, to inform voters about the fundamental variables and their appropriate weights; notably, the candidate’s ideologies and their positions on major issues” (Gelman and King 1993). As some scholars have pointed out, those fundamentals come directly from the campaigns. The term ‘fundamentals’ here refers to the set of economic and political circumstances which are known during the election and make the results predictable even before the eventual outcomes are stated in the polls. “The campaign effectively brings home the fundamentals to voters” (Erikson and Wlezien 2012). In other words, the voters’ final decisions are made up of several variables, which represent the fundamentals. When the campaign is not able to bring home the fundamentals to voters, it represents a failure of the

Franklin and Jackson (1983), there are two kinds offundamental variables. The first

kind refers to the characteristics of voters, such as their positions on given issues, party identifications and so on. The second refers to the voters’ perception of the characteristics of candidates such as their ideology and of the incumbency effect.

Another way to define the fundamentals is to focus on their persistence effect rather than on their ability to drive voters sentiment. Specifically, the fundamentals are a set of variables that cause a long-term shift in voters’ preferences which lasts for the rest of the election campaign. When and how those fundamentals appear during the campaign changes even within the election itself, as well as from one campaign to the next. For instance, some of them could appear even before the official election campaign has started; others simply evolve during the course of the campaign. In light of this, there are two different assumptions in the literature. The first is that the influence of fundamentals highlights that the campaign does not matter in the end. In other words, its predictability has minimal effects. The second assumption is based on the “predictable campaign” of Campbell (2008), which refers to all those strategies employed during the campaign in order to structure partisan votes. In other words, the campaign does matter because there are substantial campaign effects even if they are cancelled out.

Campaigns influence voters through the fundamentals in three ways: learning, priming, and persuasion. According to the first way, the predictability of a campaign also implies that the voters are enlightened by campaigns through their interest in or their view of government performance (Gelman and King 1993). Some cross-

sectional research has pointed out how the fundamentals can actually last even longer than the election campaign (Stevenson and Vabreck 2000) because voters have more time to ‘learn’ about them. On this basis, fundamentals help voters to learn and stay focused on the positions of parties and candidates, as well as to increase their political attention in order to decide as Election Day approaches. In a multiparty system especially where there is lower visibility of candidates, the fundamentals of election campaigns play a crucial role. For instance, low-visibility election speeches provide information to voters in order to help them gauge the candidates’s ideology or manifesto. The second way to influence voters using fundamentals is through the knowledge that voters themselves have about to different topics.

In the literature, priming has mostly been investigated by attention to the acti- vation of voters’ partisan predispositions (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954), racial cues (Mendelberg, 2001), and gender (Kahn and Goldenberg 1991). For in- stance, Vavreck (2009) has pointed out that the candidates choose the election campaign issues according to their ability to gain the attention of voters and there- fore, dictate the election outcome. The third way the campaign can influence voters is through persuasion. Using Erikson and Wlezien’s (2012) words: ‘What matters most, after all, is changing voters’ electoral preference” and to do that the campaign must persuade voters to move their decision in candidates’ preferred directions (Bar- tels 2006, Hillygus and Shields 2008). Despite the different ways the campaigns use fundamentals to shift voters sentiments, we cannot rule out that the campaigns’ events include many political shocks that may produce changes in voters sentiment.

In other words, all the campaign events (speeches, advertising, mobilization efforts and so on) produce inputs that voters evaluate during an election campaign. The difficulty is to estimate their effects on those evaluations and, in particular, on voters sentiment. One way to estimate could be using polls, but a part of the ‘change’ re- ported is also due to sampling error. In other words, the estimation is spurious and the effects deriving directly from speeches or TV debates rarely have a long-term impact. However, polls are the most common tool used over the election campaign to record the response in terms of changes in voters sentiment because the true change has a short temporary duration compared with the voters sentiment change as reported in polls. According to this, if the campaign events do have effects on voters sentiment, we should be able to observe this in poll movements over the course of the campaign.

During an election campaign, voters do not have access to full information on candidates but they do gather and increase this information over time, with the largest increase just before Election Day. In other words, voters do not have the necessary information at the beginning of the campaign to state their voting inten- tions. Polls ask whether they intend to vote and for whom vote and, in doing so, they provide basic information about the election race. Voters use this information about the fundamentals variables and they report their ‘likely’ vote to the pollster. However, it may be possible that responses reported in polls are biased because of differences in the information available then, and on Election Day. In other words, the discrepancy between polls and election results is also due to the extent to which

voters’ information sets increase over the course of the election campaign. It assumes that voters little by little improve their knowledge of their fundamentals variables and gather all the essential information that they need by Election Day. According to this, polls at the beginning of the election campaign are the result of the degree of information available at that time. A good example of this is the work of Gelman and King (1993), where the evidence of most of change among polls is given by the change in voters’ perceptions of the relative importance of their fundamentals variables, rather than the change in the value of those fundamentals.

In addition, Gelman and King (1993) have pointed out that campaign strategists use the results provided by polls carried out at the start of the campaign in order to create their strategies for the event. The latter become endogenous parts of the campaign because strategists attempt to take advantage of this information by selecting only certain groups of likely voters. However, these are short-term strategies, because closer to Election Day, respondents gather their fundamentals variables and weight them to maximize their interest or goal in the election.

In the light of the main purpose of this thesis, explaining what most causes the inaccuracy of polls over an election competition, also allows us to explain to what extent the fundamentals actually do matter and how voters sentiment has been influenced by the campaign itself.