Proposition 1. How do the best-known politicians divide the seats among themselves?
We cannot predict who will govern with whom. But we can predict, based on the brand laws, how many seats the different parties will get in the elections. The most important question to arrive at this prediction is:
When you think about the elections in March, who is the first politician that comes to mind?
Top-of-mind awareness when thinking about the elections in March.
It is clear that the Dutch think of Rutte and Wilders by far the first (respectively 30% and 29% of respondents). Klaver can count on less than a fifth of this interest (12.3%) and Roemer and Pechtold on half of that (6.9% and 6.8%). Half of that applies to Asscher (3.7%). No other politician stands out from the crowd. It is surprising that despite the media attention that Asscher receives as a governing politician, he is mentioned relatively little. Kuzu and Simons are also not among the top ten.
We also measured other spontaneous awareness, by asking which politicians come to mind when people think about the elections. Respondents could name up to ten politicians. The results are hotel contact database below.
Spontaneous fame of politicians by position in which they were mentioned.
If Rutte is not mentioned first, we see that he is mentioned second by far the most (400), followed by Wilders (201), then Pechtold (85) and in equal measure Roemer, Klaver and Asscher. Third, Pechtold and Wilders are mentioned most often, followed by Asscher and Klaver and so on. Because we know that the later associations are mentioned, the weaker the link, the predictive value of this spontaneous familiarity decreases.
We now include both top-of-mind awareness and spontaneous awareness in our prediction of the number of seats. This is also called salience or depth of brand awareness. We assume that depth of brand awareness is the most important predictor of the number of votes a politician receives. At the time of voting, we do not reconsider all our options, but choose the one that first comes to mind. In total, 94% of our respondents indicated that they would vote and 70% already knew which party. We therefore assume that 'the choice' has already been made.