Early EEG responses to pre-electoral survey items reflect political attitudes and predict voting behavior.

Self-reports are conventionally used to measure political preferences, yet individuals may be unable or unwilling to report their political attitudes. Here, in 69 participants we compared implicit and explicit methods of political attitude assessment and focused our investigation on populist attitudes. Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) from future voters while they completed a survey that measured levels of agreement on different political issues. An Implicit Association Test (IAT) was administered at the end of the recording session. Neural signals differed as a function of future vote for a populist or mainstream party and of whether survey items expressed populist or non-populist views. The combination of EEG responses and self-reported preferences predicted electoral choice better than traditional socio-demographic and ideological variables, while IAT scores were not a significant predictor. These findings suggest that measurements of brain activity can refine the assessment of socio-political attitudes, even when those attitudes are not based on traditional ideological divides.

An evaluation of the performance and suitability of R × C methods for ecological inference with known true values.

Ecological inference refers to the study of individuals using aggregate data and it is used in an impressive number of studies; it is well known, however, that the study of individuals using group data suffers from an ecological fallacy problem (Robinson in Am Sociol Rev 15:351-357, 1950). This paper evaluates the accuracy of two recent methods, the Rosen et al. (Stat Neerl 55:134-156, 2001) and the Greiner and Quinn (J R Stat Soc Ser A (Statistics in Society) 172:67-81, 2009) and the long-standing Goodman's (Am Sociol Rev 18:663-664, 1953; Am J Sociol 64:610-625, 1959) method designed to estimate all cells of R × C tables simultaneously by employing exclusively aggregate data. To conduct these tests we leverage on extensive electoral data for which the true quantities of interest are known. In particular, we focus on examining the extent to which the confidence intervals provided by the three methods contain the true values. The paper also provides important guidelines regarding the appropriate contexts for employing these models.