Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections / Daniel J. Benjamin, Jesse M. Shapiro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Benjamin, Daniel J.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Shapiro, Jesse M.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w12660.

NBER working paper series no. w12660

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2006.

Summary:

We showed 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asked them to predict the election outcomes. The participants' predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections in our study, and their importance survives a range of controls, including state fixed effects. In a horse race of alternative forecasting models, participants' visual forecasts significantly outperform economic variables in predicting vote shares, and are comparable in predictive power to a measure of incumbency status. Adding policy information to the video clips by turning on the sound tends, if anything, to worsen participants' accuracy, suggesting that naïveté may be an asset in some forecasting tasks.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2006.