Reverse Network Effects: Election Forecasts
A recent article speculated that the presidential election was greatly influenced by election polls. Clinton’s chief campaign strategist explained that the national “obsession” with campaign forecasters worried the Democratic campaign in the final weeks of the election. Recently, a new phenomenon of reporting on elections by forecasting probabilities of victories has begun. However, these reports are not solely based off of national and state polls. Instead, they are just forecasts. This information acts as cheap news for media outlets, and actually acts more as journalism than it does news, because the reports aren’t based entirely on facts.
The Democratic campaign actually believes that the polls overwhelming expectation of a Clinton victory ended up discouraging people to vote, which is why they consider it a major factor in her loss. People believed that Clinton would win with ease, since the forecasts has predicted that, but it proved to be entirely wrong.
In class we discuss network effects, and why we witness a greater amount of people do something when they expect others to do so. Here, we see the opposite effect. Due to the forecasts, many people believed many other people would vote for Clinton, so they felt less inclined to do so. they simply figured they didn’t need to because the media was portraying a seemingly definite Clinton victory. If network effects had existed, we would have seen an even more overwhelming Clinton victory because of the forecasts. However, since people aren’t required to vote, they simply chose not to because they didn’t think they needed to. Had every citizen been required to vote, I think the results of the election would have been substantially different.