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2025-01-13 02:49:40

On polling and propaganda

For almost two years now polls in Canada have shown that the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Pierre Poilievre, Canada's answer to Donald Trump, have a commanding lead over the governing Liberal Party led until recently by Justin Trudeau. There is no doubt that this was a major factor leading to Trudeau's resignation, in the hope that the Liberal Party might recover lost ground under a new leader.

At the same time, I can't help feeling that the polls have a lot of influence on how Canadians will vote.

I wrote a thread on Mastodon about how this might work. The Conservative Party's messaging consists simply of repeating “Justin Trudeau is a horrible person and he should resign”. This is spread both by conventional media and corporate social media as news and commentary.

Then one day you get a phone call from a polling company asking whether you agree that Justin Trudeau is a horrible person and he should resign”. What are the odds that you will say yes, if you've been exposed to the statement repeatedly?

Polls are viewed as representing the most probable outcome of an election “if it were held today”. But that probability is only conditional. It is the probability that you will vote one way or another given that you've been exposed to a certain propaganda. I am sure that if in a parallel universe where the Conservative Party of Canada has not been hammering the message about Trudeau for years a similar poll was conducted, the result would be quite different.

But there's more. The poll itself has an influence on the election outcome. One reason is what is known as “social proof”. Gil Duran has a great post about this in The Framelab. He writes

People tend to copy what other people do. If something is popular, we tend to trust it more. When many other people buy a product or follow a trend, we tend to assume it’s good. Our brains are wired to look for clues from other people’s choices. It’s a basic human instinct to follow the crowd. “Monkey see, monkey do.”

If you see that a majority of your fellow voters will vote Conservative, you are more likely to do so yourself. Marketers know this very well.

The poll may also have another effect on the outcome of the election: If you are not a Conservative voter, but you are convinced that the Conservatives will win, that makes you less likely to take the trouble to vote. The poll becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I see propaganda as a process, where a certain political message is spread to as many people as possible and then polling is a feedback mechanism that confirms that the message is true. Polling skeptics will scrutinize the methodology and the statistical methods, and I have been one of them, but I believe now that that is missing the point. The polls can be quite accurate in that they reflect popular opinion, and yet be a key component of the propaganda process.

#Democracy #Elections #Statistics #Propaganda

Jedi Mind Tricks: The persuasive power of 'social proof'

The 'wisdom of crowds' and the power of persuasion

^{Gil Duran (FrameLab)}