The failure of exit polls hold behavioural lessons for us
What did you have for breakfast two days ago? Having breakfast is a routine affair. Not much thought goes into such a decision. So most of us would have forgotten the details of what we consumed as the first meal of that day.
On the other hand, how many of us have forgotten who we voted for in the general election of 2024? Voting in a national election is not routine behaviour. For most people, voting is a much thought-through decision. It is unlikely that one would forget which political party one voted for, and this memory will probably stay intact for years to come.
If this is so, why did most exit polls of the recent election fail to elicit this data from the immediate memory of voters with sufficient accuracy to forecast the outcome correctly? The typical explanation that is provided for the unreliability of consumer research is that its survey methodology was flawed. Not selecting the right samples that accurately represent the larger voter universe of each constituency, for example, could be a significant source of error. No doubt, the Indian voter universe, with an electorate whose voting behaviour is influenced by multiple factors, is far more complex than in any other democracy.
Once the field work for such a survey is done, using the responses of voters after they left polling booths to calculate the vote share of rival parties within every constituency is quite a task. Even with the best statistical methods, accurately evaluating the electorate’s verdict is far from easy. But the market research industry in India is several decades old and various polling agencies have conducted plenty of consumer research across the years.
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