Links — 10 Oct 2008

Pew Research Center
Trump’s International Ratings Remain Low, Especially Among Key Allies
Richard Wike, Bruce Stokes, Jacob Poushter, Laura Silver, Janell Fetterolf and Kat Devlin

Sputnik International
Canisters With Chlorine Got in Daesh Hands Due to West's Irresponsibility - MoD

RT

ISIS seizes chlorine canisters in attack on Al-Nusra & White Helmets – Russian MoD

Reminiscences of the Future
It Is The Devil You Know
Andrei Martyanov

Sputnik International

China’s Top-Secret H-20 Stealth Bomber to Make Maiden Flight Soon

Zero Hedge
Rand Paul Rages At Cory Booker's Rhetoric, Warns "Someone Is Going To Be Killed"

Crooks and Liars

Internet Mocks Rand And Kelley Paul For Irrational Fear Of Liberals With Guns

Red Painter

Eric Holder Whips Up Democrats: When They Go Low, We Kick Them

Tyler Durden

Common Dreams

'I Know This Is Shocking,' Says Sanders, But Trump 'Lying About Medicare for All'

Jon Queally, staff writer

The Nation
Medicare for All Is Officially Winning

John Nichols

Raw Story

Chief Justice John Roberts orders new investigation into Brett Kavanaugh: Fox News

Bob Brigham

Salon

Trump, McConnell and Kavanaugh have changed the game; there will be no more business as usual

Lucian K. Truscott IV

John Lounsbury — Debt Ceiling Polls: WTF?

Why don't polls really find out what Americans know as well as what their opinions are? How many people giving opinions have no idea what they are talking about?

Global Economic Intersection
Debt Ceiling Polls: WTF?
John Lounsbury

Justin Fox — What Does Nate Silver's '80.9% Chance of Winning' Mean, Anyway?

Justin Fox explains how the probability scoring works. It's not what many think.

Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
What Does Nate Silver's '80.9% Chance of Winning' Mean, Anyway?
Justin Fox

David M. Rothschild — Understanding How Polls Affect Voters

Confirming past studies, we find strong evidence of an overall bandwagon effect; people become more supportive of policies that have more general support. We further find that both social acceptance and social learning drive the bandwagon effect. However, the effect of social learning is significantly and substantially stronger than that of social acceptance. Thus, the main reason that people conform to majority opinion in the political domain is that they believe there is information about the quality of the candidates or policies to be learned from mass support. We find no evidence for the third mechanism -- that people conform because they want to reduce cognitive dissonance related to not supporting a candidate that will likely win or policy that will likely be implemented.

The idea of the bandwagon effect seems disheartening for democracy if conformity pressures silence minority opinions. However, this research has given us a reason for optimism; people seem to be conforming not only because they see normative value in being part of the majority but also because they believe that there is information in collective opinion. Citizens want to be informed and the collective wisdom of their fellow citizens is just one source of information on which they have learned to rely.

PredictWise
Understanding How Polls Affect Voters
David M. Rothschild | PhD in Applied Economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Economist with MicroSoft Research-NYC, and a fellow at the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia.