Polls, Opinions and Political Decisions – An Information Theory View of the 1999 Elections

Dov Te’eni, Nachshon Margaliot, and Yaacov J. Katz

The 1999 elections highlighted two converging trends: the voters moved towards the centre of the political map, and the media of the political discourse converged to the national mainstream media. Modelling polls and politics as a system, we use information theory to explain how these two trends increased (1) the difficulty of predicting the election outcome, (2) the consequent popularity of polls, and (3) their impact on political behaviour. Despite these effects, there remained widespread threats to the validity of the polls. We describe a new method for polling that builds on voters’ previous voting patterns. Interestingly, this method revealed systematic biases in the responses to polls.