Opinion | The great electoral mandate and the wisdom of crowds
4 min read . Updated: 23 May 2019, 02:21 PM ISTLarge groups of people are often collectively smarter than individual experts with specialized domain knowledge
Even as curtains are drawn on the biggest ‘festival of democracy’ and the NDA prepares to form the government, exit polls and psephologists seem to have got it right in 2019. While there had been much speculation regarding the veracity of such polls, especially in the wake of some of these polls going wrong badly, the question is: Is there a way for superior and more credible predictions of electoral outcomes than what is currently practiced by drawing on the opinion of the experts? Can political parties adopt some of these methods to continuously improve outcomes on the D-Day?
James Surowiecki in his 2005 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, posited that under certain conditions, large groups of people are collectively smarter than even individual experts when it comes to problem solving, decision making, innovating and predicting. The notion of collective judgement itself is traced back to the observation by statistician Francis Galton in 1907 based on an experiment involving ‘ guess the weight of the ox’ competition at a country fair. Galton discovered that an average of the eight hundred entries (1197 lb) produced a remarkably accurate estimate of the actual weight (1198 lb)– beating not only most of the individual guesses, but also those of alleged cattle experts.
The conditions for the crowds to be ‘wise’ include ensuring diversity and independence of opinions; sufficient individual knowledge on the part of the decision-maker to make his/her own opinion and possibility to aggregate the individual opinions of the crowds into one collective decision.
We decided to test this concept to predict and test the Indian electoral outcomes of 2019. A simple questionnaire, ensuring that the four conditions were met, was administered to a group of 215 business school participants from diverse backgrounds and demographics under conditions which ensured independence of the opinions elicited. This was done two days before the exit poll results, at a time when most of the states had finished with their voting.
The respondents’ ages ranged from 21 years to 59 years; the respondents belonged to different income groups, as also occupations- with several belonging to business families, as also corporate backgrounds. The survey drew from people belonging to all parts of the country.
The survey was based on four questions: a) the opinion of the respondent on the party/alliance that was likely to win the General elections 2019 b) their opinion on who they think ought to win c) the probabilities of parties/alliances winning and forming the government d) the most important factor that would influence voter decision in the 2019 elections.
The survey results were interesting in that there was a clear difference between what the crowds thought would happen versus what they thought should happen. A large proportion (62 per cent) predicted that the BJP and its allies would win the elections, while 32 per cent felt that the BJP alone would win the elections. The proportion of people predicting a Third Front (non BJP-non Congress) was abysmally low at 2 per cent, while the Congress and its allies (UPA) itself could muster only 3 per cent of the share.
On the question of which party, they thought deserved to win and form the government, 50 per cent thought it should be the BJP alone, while 34 per cent felt it should be the BJP with allies. The proportion of people who thought a Congress alliance or a Third front should win and form the government was 5 and 7 per cent respectively, while 3 per cent felt that no one deserved to win.
BJP and allies, the respondents felt, had a 62 per cent chance of winning and forming the government, while the odds of the Third Front and Congress of forming the government were 14 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, while 9 per cent felt there would be a hung parliament.
On the most important issues that would influence voter decision, 29 per cent (the highest proportion) attributed economic growth as the most important factor. The ‘There is No Alternative’ (TINA) factor followed with 17 per cent, while unemployment and job loss came third at 15 per cent. Interestingly, however, it was the economic factors (growth and unemployment) which predominated at 44 per cent. Other factors surveyed included national security, especially India-Pakistan tensions (17%), social security (4%), caste and communal divide (7%), political ideology (6%), presence of local candidates (3%), and candidate based on similar caste /religion (3%).
The results of this survey seem to now match with actual outcomes. However, the process of eliciting such opinion as also the outcomes, generate interesting insights. There may be a discrepancy between what people think ought to happen versus what they think would happen. The former is a metric which is what exit polls capture and may be different from the latter- which forms the basis of collective judgment. However, it is collective judgment which is more likely to converge to the actual outcomes than the former metric.
Again, interestingly collective judgment reveals that it was not Pulwama, social security or TINA, but rather economic issues which would still have reigned supreme in the mind of the voter, even as he voted for the BJP. The moot question then, with collective judgment converging towards the actual result, is this: What lessons should the opposition parties draw from this exercise?
Tulsi Jayakumar is professor of economics at S.P Jain Institute of Management and Research
The author acknowledges the discussions with Dr. Ranjan Banerjee and Dr.Anshul Verma in writing this piece