Neil Malhotra

Who they are

According to his Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty profile, Malhotra holds the Edith M. Cornell chair in Political Economy, is professor of political science by courtesy in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and directs the Center for Social Innovation. His degrees are a BA in Economics from Yale University (2002) and an MA (2005) and PhD (2008) in Political Science from Stanford University. His listed research areas are American politics, political behaviour and survey methodology.

Key papers

Rothschild, D., & Malhotra, N. (2014), Are Public Opinion Polls Self-Fulfilling Prophecies? Research & Politics, 1(2), doi:10.1177/2053168014547667. A randomised survey experiment on a diverse national sample, in which people received information about different levels of support for three public policies. The authors find that public opinion as expressed through polls affects individual-level attitudes, although the size of the effect depends on issue characteristics, and they describe the existing empirical literature on the bandwagon effects of polls as surprisingly limited.

Key ideas

The paper treats whether a poll changes opinion as a causal question and addresses it by assigning people at random to different information.

The abstract reports that poll information shifts attitudes and that the size of the effect depends on issue characteristics. The article on the bandwagon effect uses it alongside the 1993 Canadian study.

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