[rolux]

Not being a US citizen, I'm always quite stunned by what I perceive as an obsession with polling results. Especially when fundamental flaws in the US voting system (see, for example, http://www.gregpalast.com/latinos-too-lazy-to-vote/) seem to get widely ignored.

Sites like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ may be great in bringing insightful reflections on statistics to a larger audience, but by focusing exclusively on the maths of elections, they might actually reinforce this ignorance towards actual political issues.

[ilconsigliere]

The New Yorker is talking about this very subject today: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/10/da...

I read that article this morning and still signed up for pingpoll minutes later..

[rolux]

Thanks for sharing that link, good article.

Still, its main concern seems to be the predictive value of forecast models, given that "stuff happens" -- while I'm more concerned with the fact that the obsession with polling and forecasts coincides (hard to tell if it's a cause or an effect) with widespread ignorance when it comes to massively undemocratic features of the US voting system.

[jsdalton]

What is your thesis, exactly? People have a finite amount of attention they are willing to devote to politics, and the obsession with polling thus excludes them from paying attention to these supposedly undemocratic features?

Seems far fetched to me but I'd imagine it's testable. One could test people about their knowledge of poll data and then see whether a higher degree of interest in polls correlated with a lower awareness of these undemocratic feature. I would imagine you'd find your thesis refuted in such a test.

Anyhow, it's likely you're trying to convey something that I'm not quite understanding so please feel free to correct me.

Speaking personally, I would posit that the media puts more focus on polls because they are both interesting and timely to viewers, where as discussions about the flaws of first-past-the-post voting are more dry and are not timely -- timeliness being a crucial determiner of what gets reported as news. So unless there are newsmakers actively making a spectacle about the issue, you're not going to here about it in mainstream media.

[rolux]

If you're asking me for a thesis, then I guess it would include the idea that what people should be willing to devote to politics is more than, and fundamentally different from, attention. Once politics become politics of attention, they become, quite precisely, the spectacle you're referring to: a real-time feed of gossip, gaffes and stats.

More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term for it.

[RyanMcGreal]

Here's a hypothesis for you: it's easier to follow the polls than it is to follow the issues, and when polling soundbites are ubiquitous, people will tend to follow the polls instead of following the issues.

You can spend an hour watching a presidential debate (plus additional hours looking up the various claims made), or you can spend a minute reading the heading, deck and first paragraph of an article that says this or that candidate "won" the debate.

Polls function as a kind of supernormal stimulus [1] that displace real analysis, in a manner analogous to the way that junk food, which distils fat, sugar and salt to their essence, displaces whole foods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

[mayneack]

Nate Silver (probably in response to some of these things) also has a blog about the limits of his (and other) models: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/oct-23-t...

[PhrosTT]

I always wonder what kind of influence polls have on voters.

A lot of people probably won't bother voting if their state is a perceived landslide.

[smackfu]

Let me flip this backwards: Why wouldn't polls get a lot of attention? People want to know who will win the election in advance, just like they like spoilers. Polls are a fact-based way to report on it.

I think other countries don't focus on polls much simply because in a parliamentary system, it's very hard to poll. It would be like trying to poll the US House races, which no one really does.