Examples of DA applications in sociology and elections

What group of voters forms the largest electorate reserve?

During an election campaign for city mayor, the analysts from a candidate’s election committee addressed the following task: "To identify groups of voters for which active propaganda will most quickly increase the candidate’s already existing electorate."

Political analysis and public opinion polls have shown that electoral preferences are influenced by education and age. The problem was then specified as follows: "In each education group of potentially active voters, find the age cohort boundaries so that the proportion of uncommitted voters in this group is over 50 %."

With the help of DALSolution, this problem was solved. The following groups of voters were identified as campaign targets:

Voters, aged 20 to 35, with a college education
Voters, aged 20 to 49, with a high school education
Voters, aged 80 and over, with education below the high school level

The group age boundaries were not arbitrary, but computed with the help of DALSolution, based on the condition that over 50% of each group should be composed of potentially active voters who are yet undecided about their candidate.

These three categories of voters turned out to represent 57% of all uncommitted, potentially active voters, whose votes are important to fight for during an election campaign. This is a high percentage. It shows that propaganda targeted at these voters (taking voter preferences into account in each group) is justified.

Presidential elections. Which candidate is favored?

Campaign managers and analysts often use public opinion polls. DALSolution provides convenient tools for analyzing such polls. During the 1996 presidential campaign in Russia, histograms with “For” and “Against” columns were a weekly source of excitement for TV spectators, while experts were interested in more realistic methods of evaluating the chances of each candidate. In March of that year, three months prior to the elections, Yeltsin’s narrow (committed) electorate was twice that of Lebed:

The narrow (committed) electorate of Yeltsin was 13 %
The narrow (committed) electorate of Lebed was 6.3 %

However, the chances of a candidate are also measured by the size of the so-called “broad electorate”, i.e. those voters who will vote for the candidate in the first, second, or third order of preference. Analysis with DALSolution showed that Lebed did not concede to Yeltsin in this respect; Lebed had a larger broad electorate than Yeltsin:

The broad electorate of Yeltsin was 19.9 %
The broad electorate of Lebed was 21.7 %

For Yeltsin, the broad electorate was one and a half times larger than his narrow electorate; for Lebed the same ratio was almost three and a half.