Bradley Effect
The Bradley Effect (also Wilder Effect ) describes in opinion research on political elections in the United States an attempt to explain a deviation of the voting result from the opinion polls at the expense of a non-white candidate. Named is the theory of Tom Bradley , the African-American mayor of Los Angeles , the 1982 elections to governor of California lost, although he led in some polls, and after the African-American politician Douglas Wilder , the 1989 elections to the Governor of Virginia with won far less than the predicted lead in votes.
Opinion level
According to the theory, the deviation is due to the fact that the respondents perceive the true answer of voting against the non-white candidate as socially undesirable and therefore claim to be undecided or to vote for the non-white candidate. In particular, some white voters give wrong answers when asked for fear of being criticized for making their voting decisions based on skin color. The reluctance to give an accurate answer to the question of voting is sometimes extended to polls after voting at the ballot box. The skin color of the questioner could influence the voter's answer.
Some pollsters have dismissed the Bradley Effect theory as baseless, while others have argued that the effect may have been in previous elections but not the most recent. An analysis of 133 Senate and gubernatorial elections between 1989 and 2006 comes to the conclusion that before 1996 black candidates performed a median 3.1% worse than in the polls, but since 1996 0.3% better. Likewise, some election researchers, such as psychologist Anthony Greenwald and political scientist Bethany Albertson , advocate the theory of the "reverse" Bradley effect. Both explain their theses with socially desirable behavior of people in surveys.
Comparable explanations
Similar effects have been claimed in other contexts, in particular:
- Expectation expectation
- Spiral of silence
- Shy Tory Factor (to the benefit of the British Conservatives )
- Flora Syndrome (to the detriment of female candidates, named after the Canadian politician Flora MacDonald ).
- Silent Majority (see also Wikipedia)
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from October 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed October 10, 2008)
- ^ Spiegel Online: Opinion researchers are sometimes very wrong
