To look for unexpected influences on voting habits, researchers recently compiled the individual county outcomes of presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial elections between 1964 and 2008 and compared them with local college football results during the same period. They found that a home team win in the 2 weeks before Election Day gave an incumbent politician a 1.05% to 1.47% bump in the polls. Areas with ardent football fans were even more susceptible to this effect. Where local game attendance is among the top 20 in the nation, incumbents gained an additional 2.42 points, according to a paper published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers suspect that this effect comes from gleeful fans selectively remembering favorable policy decisions and sticking with the status quo.
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Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Not Encouraging:
Science magazine:
Vote fraud and stupidity doesn't matter much to democracy, since it only affects the result when the vote is otherwise close.
ReplyDeleteIf the vote is otherwise close, then democracy doesn't care much one way or the other.
It only means that you need 53% instead of 50.1% to throw the rascals out.
Soap opera mainstream media news coverage has more of an effect.