The ayes have it!

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One for the hard-core research nerds – in Ohio this week, voters said “no” to a ballot initiative that would have raised the threshold for successful future referendums from 50% to 60%.  And it wasn’t a close outcome.

This result was surprising because some polling had the issue nearly tied. Data analyst Lakshya Jain argues that behavioral science can explain this.

Jain explains that “yes” frequently performs better in referendum polling than it does at the ballot box because of acquiescence bias (where people are likely to try to be agreeable) and status quo bias (a preference for the current state of affairs).   

Specifically, voters tend to lean “yes” when being surveyed to seem like nice people, and they tend to lean “no” in the voting booth because they want to keep things as they are. Interestingly (and a bit counter-intuitively), acquiescence bias is worse in online surveys than it is in polls conducted by live interviewers. 

This speaks to the need for researchers (not just in political research but in marketing research, as well) to think carefully about their methodologies and use multiple methods as they search for truths.