Did Shy Trump Supporters Bias the 2016 Polls? Evidence from a Nationally-representative List Experiment

Coppock Alexander ()
Additional contact information
Coppock Alexander: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA

Statistics, Politics and Policy, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 29-40

Abstract: Explanations for the failure to predict Donald Trump’s win in the 2016 Presidential election sometimes include the “Shy Trump Supporter” hypothesis, according to which some Trump supporters succumb to social desirability bias and hide their vote preference from pollsters. I evaluate this hypothesis by comparing direct question and list experimental estimates of Trump support in a nationally representative survey of 5290 American adults fielded from September 2 to September 13, 2016. Of these, 32.5% report supporting Trump’s candidacy. A list experiment conducted on the same respondents yields an estimate 29.6%, suggesting that Trump’s poll numbers were not artificially deflated by social desirability bias as the list experiment estimate is actually lower than direct question estimate. I further investigate differences across measurement modes for relevant demographic and political subgroups and find no evidence in support of the “Shy Trump Supporter” hypothesis.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2016-0005 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:8:y:2017:i:1:p:29-40:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/spp/html

DOI: 10.1515/spp-2016-0005

Access Statistics for this article

Statistics, Politics and Policy is currently edited by Joel A. Middleton

More articles in Statistics, Politics and Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().