Berlin 2008 – scientific programme
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AKSOE: Arbeitskreis Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
AKSOE 12: Dynamics of groups and organizations IV
AKSOE 12.4: Talk
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 16:15–16:45, EW 203
Investigation of opinion poll data and election results in Germany and Great Britain — •Johannes Josef Schneider1 and Christian Hirtreiter2 — 1Institute of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Staudinger Weg 7, 55099 Mainz, Germany — 2Faculty of Chemistry, University of Regensburg, 93040 Regensburg, Germany
Since many years, the Allensbach institute in Germany and a related institute in Great Britain performs an opinion poll each week, asking at least 1000 people the question "Which party would you vote for if there was an election next Sunday?"
We investigate these opinion poll data by means of time series analysis. The most prominent results for the German data are fat tails in the return distributions of the time series. Furthermore, we find that the election results for the Green party cannot be predicted at all by opinion polls, for the conservative and the social democratic party, we find that the opinion poll data agree the more with the election results, the closer the date of the opinion poll is to the election date [1]. Thus, the question arises whether an opinion poll long before an election provides any useful information at all.
In this talk, we compare the results we found in Germany with corresponding data from Great Britain.
[1] J.J. Schneider and Ch. Hirtreiter, preprint, accepted for publication in Int. J. Mod. Phys. C, 2007.