Working Paper: NBER ID: w12660
Authors: Daniel J. Benjamin; Jesse M. Shapiro
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: elections; forecasting; visual assessments; economic predictors
JEL Codes: D72; J45
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| participants' visual forecasts (C53) | actual vote share (D79) |
| share of participants predicting a Democratic victory (D79) | actual vote share (D79) |
| adding sound to video clips (Y60) | prediction accuracy (C52) |
| participants' reactions (C90) | voter behavior (K16) |
| candidate characteristics (D79) | electoral outcomes (K16) |
| participants detecting candidates' confidence (D79) | predictive accuracy (C52) |