Will Hillary Clinton Be Stampeded by the ‘Herding’ Effect?

[jefferson_dem]

December 17, 2007, 5:58 pm
Will Hillary Clinton Be Stampeded by the ‘Herding’ Effect?
By The Editorial Board

Many voices have been raised — including this Editorial Page’s – against the presidential primary calendar, which gives states like Iowa and New Hampshire an undeservedly outsized role in selecting the nominees.

An academic study has now quantified the how the system cheats voters from states that come later in the calendar — and the significant effect the primary calendar can have on which candidate wins the nomination.

Using poll data from the 2004 Democratic primaries, two Brown University economists — Brian Knight, an associate professor of economics and Nathan Schiff, a graduate student — calculated that voters in early primaries had about 20 times the influence on the outcome as voters in later states.

Sequencing of primaries is crucial because voters are prone to “herding behavior” — they tend to coalesce around the most popular candidate. Early primaries provide subsequent voters with an important signal about the candidates’ desirability. According to the Brown economists, candidates who exceed expectations in the early states receive a substantial boost in the later ones.

This effect, they suggest, could define the outcome. Using the 2004 polling data to construct alternative scenarios, they concluded that if primaries had been reorganized into a different sequence that didn’t start with Iowa or New Hampshire, John Kerry might not have won the Democratic nomination.

This year, this herding effect could hurt Senator Hillary Clinton, since she is doing worse in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire than she is in the rest of the country.

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http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/will-hillary-clinton-be-stampeded-by-the-herding-effect/

[TwilightGardener]

1. Hope so.

[Bullet1987]

2. Which is why the argument that she can afford to lose IA, NH, and SC is crazy

[TwilightGardener]

3. If Obama looks like a viable winner after either Iowa or New Hampshire, she

is going to get steamrolled.

[K Gardner]

4. Exactly why we need a different system of primaries...