Abstract:

For voters, estimating beforehand which candidates will receive many or few votes in an upcoming election is valuable information. Probabilistic election forecasts help voters brace themselves for adverse outcomes or mobilize themselves to bring about favored ones, and constitute a critical prerequisite for strategic voting: By estimating which candidates stand a chance, voters can adjust their vote choices between multiple acceptable options, trying to maximize the impact of their vote. Especially in two-round voting systems such as the French presidential elections, tactical estimations of candidates’ chances are critical for making one’s vote count (Plutowski et al., 2020).

While strategic voting has been widely studied (e.g., Meffert et al., 2011), we know little about how voters rely on the news and other sources of information to gauge candidates’ differential chances at receiving a sufficient share of votes. In this study, we draw upon a four-wave panel survey coupled with a large-scale news content analysis to examine how French voters in the 2022 presidential elections predict candidates’ respective chances and adjust them over time to accommodate new developments. Using a longitudinal linkage-study design, which links voters’ expectations to the media contents that they are exposed to, we distinguish two main mechanisms that may explain voters’ differential probability estimates (Blais & Bodet, 2006): On the one hand, ongoing news coverage informs voters’ expectations, as journalists, pollsters, pundits and other commentators give visibility to those candidates deemed most relevant and expressly discuss their respective chances. On the other hand, voters have relatively stable, intrinsic reasons for believing in the viability of candidates’ bids based on their political party preference, para-social sympathies and other forms of motivated reasoning. Expanding the ongoing scholarly debate about the electoral effects of public opinion polling (e.g., Daoust et al., 2020), we investigate how both wishful thinking and different forms of current information inform the formation and updating of voters’ probabilistic estimates, eroding or reinforcing confidence in their intended vote choice.