Prediction of The Referendum Results According To People's Attitude Towards The Local Government
Abstract
In recent years, the referendums play an important role in modern democracies. With the rapid changes in globalization, information and communication technologies and the increasing complexity of economic and social problems caused by intense competition, especially the referendums that are held to maximize the legitimacy of the decisions taken by the public will are seen as direct participation of citizens in the political process when traditional forms of political participation are declining. This study present a method to predict how citizen will vote in the referendum only by starting from their attitude towards local governments. For this purpose, a qualitative research was designed and 2446 voters were interviewed in Kilis Province Center of Turkey. In the study, Support Vector Machines, which is a nonparametric classification method based on statistical learning theory, was used to estimate the referendum results that would be voted as yes or no. At the end of the study, by using twenty-six variables, the rate of people voting in the referendum was predicted by 81%. This results guide the survey companies' efforts to predict the results of the referendum
Keywords
References
- Kecman, V. (2001). Learning and soft computing, support vector machines, neural networks and fuzzy logic models. The MIT Press. yok.gov.tr, Retrieved 01.02.2017 from http://www.ysk.gov.tr/ysk/content/conn/YSKUCM/path/Contribution%20Folders/SecmenIslemleri/Secimler/2017HO-SandikveSecmenSayilari.pdf
- Atikcan, E. O. and Oge, K. (2012). Referendum campaigns in polarized societies: the case of Turkey. Turkish Studies, 13(3), 449-470.
- Baum, M. A. and Freire, A. (2001). Political parties, cleavage structures and referendum voting: electoral behavior in the Portuguese regionalization referendum of 1998. South European Society and Politics, 6(1), 1-26.
- Bornsteina, N. and Lanz, B. (2008). Voting on the environment: price or ideology? Evidence from swiss referendums. Ecological Economics, 67, 430-440.
- Borges, W. and Clarke, H. D. (2008). Cues in context: analyzing the heuristics of referendum voting with an internet survey experiment. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 18(4), 433–448.
- Closa, C. (2007). Why convene referendums? Explaining choices in eu constitutional politics. Journal of European Public Policy, 14(8), 1311–1332.
- Campbell, J. E. (2001). The referendum that didn't happen: the forecasts of the 2000 presidential election. PS, Political Science & Politics, 34(1), 33-38.
- Darcy, R. and Laver, M. (1990). Referendum dynamics and the Irish divorce amendment. Public Opinion Quarterly, 54, 1-20.
- Erikson, R. S., and Christopher W. (2008). Are political markets really superior to polls as election predictors?. Public Opinion Quarterly, 72(2), 190–215.
- Erikson, R. S., and Christopher Wlezien, (2012). Markets vs. polls as election predictors: an historical assessment. Electoral Studies, 31(3), 532–539.