Predicting the Irish "Gay Marriage" Referendum

Nikos Askitas ()

No 9570, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: On February 20 2015 Irish Premier Enda Kenny confirmed that a "yes-no" referendum on same sex marriage would be held on May 22 of the same year. A yes vote would legalise same sex marriage in Ireland. As the Irish premier put it, the vote was about "tolerance, respect and sensitivity". The electoral outcome turned out to be 62.07% for the yes vote with voter turnout at 60.52% of the registered voters. Ireland thus became the first country in the world to legalise same sex marriage through a popular vote. Using hourly Google Search data one week prior to the Irish Referendum of May 22 2015 and a simple ratio of "vote yes" to "vote no" searches I demonstrate how the outcome could have been predicted on the nose. The method is used here successfully for the second time and is so far as I know the only one which forecasts popular vote with Google Search.

Keywords: referendum; predicting; Google Trends; Google Search; complexity; behaviour; data science; computational social science; complex systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 8 pages
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cmp and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9570.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp9570

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().