November 4 in the morning, Chilesoc organized an event on election polls and their impact on the public opinion. And well, the exhibitors -in – part, defended the opinion that, in reality, the surveys do not have many effects and that the voters do not decide these things. Now, to defend that references were made to the effects of bandwagon and its opposite, and that, well, you don’t see too much clarity in that regard.
But the problem is that the effects discussed -at least, the most well-known effects – have a special feature, very strange: do Not have any political character. The information policy of the surveys would act through effects (‘vote that everyone votes’, ‘vote for the one that no one vote’) that say nothing about the field of the decision. Now, that makes no sense. There may be such effects, but the main effect of a certain information in a specific field, should be produced through process of those fields.
In the end, the ‘vote helpful’ (‘vote for someone who has more possibilities to exit’) if it is something existing, and if it is affected by the information that people have. Ultimately, the effects of electoral of, say, a majoritarian system (the old idea of Duberger that the majority system have to have 2 parties) is explained, in part, because voters decide not to waste your vote. And ‘lose the vote’ is a decision that comes out of information. By the way, not necessarily or only survey data, but in a world with surveys something should happen with them.
The above tamibén is related to the fact of where it was published surveys. The hypotheses favorite from the seminar is that the surveys influence the elite. Now, the surveys are published in mass media: Are the holder of The Third, not only of the Capital magazine. And if they are published in mass media it will be because they are of interest másivo. I doubt that the newspapers spent the headlines in things that do not interest anyone. A daily use your body in news reports to talk about things that are of interest to the elite, but the holder is for the masses. The massive appeal does not come from the idea that the survey information would affect the vote, there are many other possibilities of use and of interest on the part of the general population. But it is not something that only worries, so to speak, to the readers of Capital magazine. Them, reminding one of the magazines presented in the meeting, worry about the truth behind it and of those who do, but the interest of the results is not proprietary to them.