French presidential election: the press did better than the pollsters

2007: La presse a fait mieux que les sondeurs:Sans le savoir, la presse nationale avait prévu le résultat du premier tour presque à la virgule près. En tous cas mieux que les instituts de sondages officiels. C’est le résultat extrêmement étonnant qui sort de mon outil d’analyse de la presse, Presse 2007, qui scanne en permanence les sites de six quotidiens (Les Échos, Le Figaro, L’Humanité, Libération, Le Monde, Le Parisien) ainsi que le site Marianne 2007.

For the non-French speakers: Jean Véronis reports that a simple calculation of the relative numbers of mentions of each candidate in the major dailies predicted the outcome of the recent first round of the French presidential election significantly better than the polls. This is very interesting but not totally surprising to me given recent work by two of our undergraduates that shows that news text analysis can predict the movement of political prediction markets. We hope to prepare this work for publication soon.