Polls and Elections: Strategic Respondents and Turnout Implications

This paper studies the effect of pre-election polls on the participation decision of citizens in a large, two-candidate election, and the resulting incentives for the poll participants. Citizens have private values and voting is costly and instrumental. The environment is ex ante symmetric and features aggregate uncertainty about the distribution of preferences. Citizens base their participation decision on their own preferences and on the information provided in the poll. If all participants answer the poll truthfully, the underdog effect implies that the supporters of the trailing candidate turn out at higher rates than the supporters of the leader of the poll. This effect yields incentives for the poll participants to misrepresent their preferences to encourage the voters who have the same preferences to turn out. If poll participants are strategic, however, there does not exist an equilibrium in which the poll conveys any information. Thus, in the limit, the majority candidate wins the election almost surely, regardless of voters' posterior beliefs.