Correlations between political party size and voter memory: A statistical analysis of opinion polls

TL;DR

This study applies statistical analysis to Norwegian political polling data to uncover correlations between party size and voter memory, revealing power-law relationships and differing scaling behaviors for large and small parties.

Contribution

It introduces measures for quantifying political memory using correlation functions and scaling analysis, and applies them to real polling data to identify new patterns.

Findings

Power-law dependencies between correlation measures and party size

Different scaling behaviors for large and small parties

Identification of time correlations and self-affine scaling in polling data

Abstract

This paper describes the application of statistical methods to political polling data in order to look for correlations and memory effects. We propose measures for quantifying the political memory using the correlation function and scaling analysis. These methods reveal time correlations and self-affine scaling properties respectively, and they have been applied to polling data from Norway. Power-law dependencies have been found between correlation measures and party size, and different scaling behaviour has been found for large and small parties.