Voting for the underdog or jumping on the bandwagon? Evidence from India’s exit poll ban

Abstract

Exit poll surveys during elections are conducted to predict the outcome of actual elections. However, such polls historically have been controversial, particularly for multi-phase elections, because they can influence the behavior of voters in the later rounds of voting. If subsequent voters are more likely to vote for the predicted frontrunner, the effect is known as the bandwagon voting phenomenon, whereas if they vote for the predicted trailing candidate, the phenomenon is known as underdog voting. To avoid such issues, in 2009 the election administration in the world's largest democracy (India) introduced a blanket ban on publishing exit polls in the media until all rounds of an election are completed. Exploiting the potentially exogenous timing of this reform, and using administrative data to compare states that went to elections before and after the ban, we find that in response to the policy, vote shares increased for the frontrunner and declined for others. The result implies that in the counterfactual, without the ban, fewer people would have voted for the frontrunner. The evidence is suggestive of underdog voting.

Casting Ballots When Knowing Results

“…Previous scholarship from elsewhere suggests that the effects we uncover here are not unique to Brazil and are likely to emerge in different types of political systems and contexts, including Britain (McAllister and Studlar 1991), France (Morton et al 2015), India (Chatterjee and Kamal 2020) and Israel (Riambau 2015). However, as we show, there are also characteristics that are specific to the Brazilian context, such as, for example, the impossibility of a bandwagon effect emerging from higher rates of turnout.…”

“…Instead of a bandwagon effect, information exposure could also prompt the opposite: an ‘underdog effect’ – a less common prospect (Hardmeier 2008) that seems to be more likely in non-competitive elections (Chatterjee and Kamal 2020). Similarly to a bandwagon effect, the underlying mechanisms underpinning higher rates of support for the trailing candidate could also emerge from vote switching or changes in mobilization rates.…”

“…In sum, while the scholarship has found plentiful evidence that access to information meaningfully impacts voter behaviour, disentangling the mechanisms underlying observable aggregate outcomes of information exposure on voter behaviour is most often not possible (Barnfield 2019; Chung, Heo and Moon 2018; Evrenk and Sher 2015). To address some of the methodological challenges faced by research employing data from naturally occurring settings (see, for example, Chatterjee and Kamal 2020; McAllister and Studlar 1991; Morton et al 2015; Riambau 2015), many studies have relied on survey or laboratory experiments seeking to replicate electoral conditions (see, for example, Agranov et al 2018; Bischoff and Egbert 2013; Farjam 2020; Fleitas 1971; Morton and Ou 2015). While these methods improve causal estimations and enable researchers to better disentangle mechanisms, the approaches yield low external validity: simulations tend to take place in unrealistic settings that cannot replicate the stakes of elections and are most commonly carried out among homogeneous groups of participants.…”

Disentangling the factors behind shifting voting intentions: The bandwagon effect reflects heuristic processing, while the underdog effect reflects fairness concerns

“…Particular strong evidence comes from a recent study that used the asynchronous introduction of a ban on publishing polling information across various Indian states as a natural experiment. Results showed that support for trailing parties was higher if polling information was available, consistent with an underdog effect (Chatterjee & Kamal, 2021).…”

Voice and Balancing in US Congressional Elections

“…1 Moreover, they may turn out to vote because of a longterm interest in maintaining democratic rule (Downs 1957, 267ff.). 2 Including the two-round presidential ballots of France (Blais 2004), the multiparty plurality contests of Canada (Schimpf 2019), India (Chatterjee and Kamal 2020) and the United Kingdom (Birch and Dennison 2019;Franklin, Niemi, and Whitten 1994;Kang 2004), the proportional system of the Netherlands (Van Spanje and Weber 2019), and the state-level elections of Germany (Kellermann 2008). 3 Using extant work as a prior, vote switching appears more likely than abstention.…”