Friday, December 21, 2012

Divining Poll Numbers and the Popular Vote


Yomiuri Shimbun is the first MSM with a post-election (December 17-18) opinion poll. Here are the numbers that caught my fancy:

party
PRD vote
Yomiuri poll
LDP
27.6
34
DPJ
15.9
11
JRP
20.3
10
YP
8.7
5
NK
11.8
5
none
28
total
100.0
100.0

The LDP and DPJ numbers tell you that people love winners and dislike losers—behavioral social scientists must have written extensively on this—while the JRP/YP numbers tell you how reliant they were, to different degrees dependent on their maturity, on the floater voters. And the (New) Komeito numbers remind us of the enduring reluctance to reveal Sokagakkai membership, even anonymously. It must be part of what they call the DNA of an institution at work.

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