TY  - JOUR
AU  - Benjamin,Daniel J.
AU  - Shapiro,Jesse M.
TI  - Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12660
PY  - 2006
Y2  - November 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12660
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12660.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daniel J. Benjamin
Institute for Social Research / PO Box 1248
426 Thompson Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248
E-Mail: daniel.benjamin@gmail.com

Jesse M. Shapiro
University of Chicago
5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/834-2688
Fax: 773-753-0563
E-Mail: jmshapir@uchicago.edu
AB  - We showed 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asked them to predict the election outcomes. The participants' predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections in our study, and their importance survives a range of controls, including state fixed effects. In a horse race of alternative forecasting models, participants' visual forecasts significantly outperform economic variables in predicting vote shares, and are comparable in predictive power to a measure of incumbency status. Adding policy information to the video clips by turning on the sound tends, if anything, to worsen participants' accuracy, suggesting that naïveté may be an asset in some forecasting tasks.
ER  -