Various factors influence the voters’ behavior before, during, and after elections. It could be what they see in the news, what they hear from the people and their feelings about candidates’ stance on issues that matter to them. 

Voter behavior surveys enable you to identify voters’ preferences and attitudes during elections. This information helps you see behavioral patterns across certain demographics towards elections and candidates, spot biases, and shape favorable election campaign strategies and policies.

So, let’s look at how to create effective voter behavior surveys, common pitfalls, and a free template to get you started.

What Are Voter Behavior Surveys?

Voter behavior surveys gather data on voters’ attitudes, preferences, and behaviors in elections and political issues. It helps you understand why voters behave the way they do, what influences their decisions, and how they respond to different campaign strategies.

The data collected from the survey helps you position your candidate rightly, and create better election policies to prevent biases. It could also help you to forecast election outcomes.

Why Do You Need Voter Behavior Surveys in Political Campaigns and Research

The following are the major reasons why every campaign strategist and political researcher should conduct a voter behavior survey:

• Positioning and Voter Engagement– Help candidates and parties understand their target audience and tailor their messages effectively. This ensures you connect with the voters, address their concerns, and gain their support.
• Strategy Formulation– your survey data can influence your campaign strategies, such as resource allocation and messaging. For instance, it might guide you to focus on the best communication channels and specific campaign trails to follow closely. You can also guide you in creating engaging messages that resonate with your audience, making them more likely to support the candidates
• Election Pattern and Prediction– Enable researchers to study voting patterns, trends, and correlations. This could help test voter behavior hypotheses and make new discoveries and even recommendations to progress political science.

How To Create a Voter Behavior Survey

Here’s a breakdown of the step-by-step procedure for creating effective voter behavior surveys:

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

This involves specifying the goals you want to achieve with the survey. For example, do you want to improve campaign strategy to acquire more support or do you want to know who would win the elections?

Knowing this would help you know the questions to add to the survey e.g. preferences, demographic questions, and opinions on specific topics or candidates.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

The next step is to determine the people you want to share the survey with. This includes questions about their demographics (age, gender, income, education), geographic location (region, city, rural/urban), and the method to collect responses from your chosen population.

Step 3: Design Your Questions

When collecting opinions on sensitive topics like elections, you want to ensure your questions are not leading or biased. If they are unclear or biased, you would most likely collect inaccurate and unreliable data that would help achieve your goal.

So, use simple language, stay neutral when asking questions related to candidates, use multiple question types so respondents can express themselves fully, and randomize questions and answers to avoid anchoring and sequence bias. 

Step 4: Choose Your Survey Method

After creating your questions, the next step is to consider your target audience preferences and device availability to select a survey method. The golden rule of thumb is to use a convenient and cost-effective method, which in most cases is online surveys. 

However, online surveys can be prone to self-selection bias, which can significantly skew results and provide inaccurate data. Using this incorrect data could derail your campaign if you use it to inform the campaign strategy.

Other alternatives are phone surveys and face-to-face surveys. They typically have a balanced representation but are time-consuming and expensive. For example, if it’s a global election for a role in an international organization, the best approach is online surveys.

Step 5: Pilot Testing

This is the final phase before launching your form, it helps you see how effective your survey is and what you can do to improve respondent experience. For example, it can help you identify question-order biases and randomize them. It can also help you identify errors while filling out the survey e.g. spelling errors, broken links, lack of accessibility for low vision, etc.

Free Voter Behavior Survey Template

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your voter behavior survey template with Formplus:

• Go to the voter behavior survey template and click use template.
• Next, sign up or log in to your account and the form will open.
• Edit the form questions to fit your volunteer requirements and click save. 
• After that, customize your form by adding your organization’s logo, color palette, and font choices, and you’re all set.

Analyzing and Interpreting Survey Data

After launching your form, and collecting responses from responses, what’s next? Leveraging the collected data to achieve your desired goal, e.g. developing a new campaign strategy, etc. Let’s look at how to analyze your voter behavior survey:

A. Data Collection and Cleaning

Steps for collecting and organizing survey responses:

• Gathering responses: Collect survey data through online forms, phone calls, or in-person interviews.
• Organizing data: Store responses in a spreadsheet or database, ensuring consistent formatting.
• Data validation: Check for errors, inconsistencies, or missing values.

Importance of Data Cleaning

• Accuracy: Ensures reliable analysis and conclusions.
• Consistency: Facilitates comparison and aggregation of data.
• Completeness: Minimizes bias from missing values.

B. Statistical Analysis

The next step after organizing your data is to analyze it according to your stated goals. For example, looking through demographics and respondents’ demographic data to understand their preferences and candidate support from that demographic. The following are the most common types of statistical analysis methods for predicting behaviors:

• Descriptive statistics: Calculate means, frequencies, and percentages to summarize data—for example, means, and frequencies of demographic vs opinion on candidates. You can use spreadsheets e.g. Excel or Google Sheets to calculate this.
• Inferential statistics: Use regression, correlation, and hypothesis testing to identify relationships and trends. For example, you could have a directly proportional trend of Millennials and Gen Z’s growing support for a candidate for election duration. You can use any of the tools used for descriptive statistics or opt for advanced statistical tools like SPSS, and Python to calculate this
• Data visualization: Use charts, graphs, and heatmaps to illustrate findings. This makes it easy for anyone to understand trends and behavioral patterns amongst your audience. You can create charts or infographics with design tools like Venngage, Canva, or even directly from your spreadsheet, and if you’re handling very large data you might want to opt for advanced tools like Power BI.

C. Interpreting Results

After analyzing your data, the next thing is to identify the trends in the data. For example, if you notice people of a certain demographic lean toward a candidate, that’s a trend. Then you go further to find the reason for this to determine the factors that cause this correlation e.g. candidate values.

After finding the reason for the correlation, the next step is to use the results to inform your campaign strategy. For example, it helps you know the key issues that matter to voters and use that in your messaging to gather support for your campaign.

Also, while interpreting results make sure to note the survey limitation e.g. sampling errors, or response rate. For example, if only people from a certain area in a city participate in your survey, your survey can’t be the true pulse of everyone in the city; note down the limitation.

Conclusion

Voter behavior surveys play a key role in helping you see patterns in voters’ behavior and use the information to inform your campaign strategy. This can significantly improve your target audience’s recognition and perception of your candidate.

Also, your voter behavior survey will only give useful information when it’s accurate, so ensure you take precautionary steps to prevent errors and note biases when interpreting the results.