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Understanding And Improving The System: The Effects Of Weighting On The Accuracy Of Political Polling In Arkansas, Beck Williams
Understanding And Improving The System: The Effects Of Weighting On The Accuracy Of Political Polling In Arkansas, Beck Williams
Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses
In an effort to increase the accuracy of statewide political polling in Arkansas, we explore the statistical strategy of weighting with a focus on one yearly opinion poll: The Arkansas Poll. We conduct over 70 weighting experiments on the 2016 and 2020 Arkansas Polls using a variety of variables and opinion questions. From these experiments, we find that while some weighted variables tend to create larger changes, weighting typically results in a single-digit percentage change that does not substantially shift or “flip” the majorities. Due to a greater rate of change through weighting in the 2020 Poll compared to the …