È possibile migliorare le previsioni di voto usando lo IAT? Una prova sul campo in occasione delle politiche del 2006

Using the data collected by Itanes on a sample of the Italian population, representative according to the main socio-demographic variables, we analyzed the relation between implicit political attitudes, assessed by the Implicit Associaton Test (IAT), and the voting behavior. Participants (N = 1,377) were interviewed twice, both before and after the 2006 Italian national election. The IAT scores, assessed before the election, showed a strong link with the voting behavior both among participants who, before the election, declared their voting intention and among those who didn’t declare it. However, the predictive power of the IAT scores was much weaker than that of the explicit judgments expressed for Prodi and Berlusconi. We discuss the problematic use of the IAT in predicting the voting behavior of the Italians.