Austrian elections?!

[hollodero]

(10-16-2017, 05:50 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: A: No, I didn't see that coming, though it would've been tough based on polling. PILZ, NEOS, and GRÜNE were all polling similarly. NEOS and PILZ ended up with results not to far off what the average polling said, but GRÜNE underperformed. I have a feeling this may be a result of some voters moving to parties not listed in some polls. Without going through each and every poll, though, that'd be hard to say for certain. I would've expected PILZ to be the underperforming one, given the new kid on the block status. Regardless of that, I think the results were well within the margins for all of them.

Well, I could add some context, but that would lead straight into overall very uninteresting depths of Austrian politics. So just shortly. PILZ is named after a former green party member named Peter Pilz, the green party more or less split up. The Pilz founder is a well-known decade-long political figure, so he was not really a "new kid on the block".

There aren't many relevant parties aside the polled ones. We do have communists and christian parties and some widely content-free projects, but they don't account for much, 2% overall tops.

And yes, the results of the polls were quite accurate. I can admit that.

(10-16-2017, 05:50 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: B: Each poll is different, but when we poll we strive for a representative sample. You start off with a large number of people, which gets smaller. Pew sees about a 9% response rate for their polls, for instance. That 9% may be several thousand people, though. Then you use demographic questions to categorize those responding to the questions. Once you have them categorized, you use the responses themselves to come up with the statistics. What you see as the margin of error (the +/- amount) is a calculation that is based upon how representative the sample is and how the respondents in those categories answered. So the more a sample deviates from the population, the greater the margin of error.

You make that sound so cool...  

(10-16-2017, 05:50 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: When I look at polls, I look at longstanding, reputable firms. I also, though, like to look at aggregated polling averages. What this does is help to even out some of the inherent biases, whether it be selection bias, bias in the wording of the question, or maybe what questions they ask at all. When you look at these averages of multiple polls, it gives you a great picture of what the public opinion is on a topic. It's essentially looking at the statistics of statistics of public polling, which gets a little meta, but it's fun. In the field I study in, we use this to gauge how politically viable a policy idea may be. We can write up a policy proposal that is heavily evidence based and is air tight in that it will benefit society in a large number of ways, but if public opinion is against it then it has to be shelved until the environment is more friendly and it can become more viable in the political arena.

Yeah right, but although I get you have a certain affinity for European politics you did not really look at aggregated polling averages for the Austrian election :) At least I think so, there are limits. I guess I widely understand what you say. My claim would be that the systematical error in polls seems high, I do not doubt the math behind the gathered numbers. I also get these systematical errors can be taken into account with suitable qualifiers; only the final results lately were quite far away, which lead me to questions like, ok who actually answers to some dude asking what he'd vote for and why (because I certainly wouldn't, and I guess many demographies are more unlikely to do it than others).

Since the latest polls did ok (unlike the first actual post-election projections, that differed so much that party members displayed whole different kinds of moods on the different stations), I guess our institutes bettered their efforts. As necessary. I didn't actually make a meta-poll out of all the available polls though; sample size would be small.

As for the rest, that's sure an interesting field of study... but doesn't it sometimes frustrate you when good ideas have to be shelved because they don't sell with the lazy, easily influenced mind that is the public. Or asked more directly, do you see it strictly professional or do you often reach the conclusion that the public opinion is quite stupid.