andreas-graefe.org

The dpa - Deutsche Presse Agantur, one of the world’s leading international news agencies, sent out a news item about the PollyIssues paper.

The Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, reports on PollyIssues. Click here for the full article.

A German-American project with a new method for predicting the US election result says Barack Obama will win in November. But are polls accurate?

Andreas Graefe of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Pennsylvania's Scott Armstrong think they have come up with a way of being more accurate.

Graefe and Armstrong's method is based around collating likely voters' stated preferences for a given candidate with their responses to questions about key issues.

"What's new about our model is that we analyze all the problems for the country raised by current opinion surveys together with voters' opinions on who can better solve those problems," the pair of researchers stated on KIT Web site.

Their methodology, called "PollyIssues" and "PollyPolicies," predicts a clear, if hardly overwhelming victory for Obama with 52.2 percent of the vote over John McCain. The two researchers are convinced that that will, indeed, be the result.

"PollyIssues would have correctly picked the winner for seven out of nine elections from 1972 to 2004, along with providing an idea of the margin of victory," Graefe and Armstrong wrote in a June 2008 academic paper. The system failed to predict the winners in 1976 and 1980 due, the report said, to the small number of polls available for evaluation.

Their current prognostication is in line with the "poll of polls" averages used by many popular political Web sites in America. They show Obama maintaining a lead of up to 6 percent.

On the Betfair Blog, Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams reports on PollyIssues. In the following, read some excerpts or click here to access the full article.

In a fascinating recent study, entitled 'Forecasting Elections from Voters' Perceptions of Candidates' Positions on Issues and Policies', Andreas Graefe and J. Scott Armstrong address this question. After eight years of George W. Bush their (perhaps surprising) conclusion is that American voters have a history of choosing the candidate they expected to do the best job in dealing with the issues facing the country.

The approach they adopt, called PollyIssues, is based on voters' perceptions of how well the candidates would deal with issues facing the country if they were to be elected. Graefe and Armstrong tested their approach for the nine US Presidential Elections from 1972 to 2004, analysing data from 315 historical polls. In seven out of nine cases, they correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote.

Moreover, for the last three elections, from 1996 to 2004, they provide evidence that PollyIssues was more accurate than four other well-established election forecasting models. For the 2008 election they are also using an approach known as PollyPolicies. This is based on voters' preference for policies and their perceptions of which policies the candidates are likely to pursue.

The newsletter of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology reports on the opening ceremony of the Karlsruhe House of Young Scientists. As a KHYS stipendiary, I was honered to give a talk on the PollyVote.

Click here for the full article.

"According to the analysis on the Pollyvote.com website updated on Wednesday, McCain is expected to get 47.4% of the two-party vote, the lowest his expected vote has been all year. Read more.