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Poll Data (poll + data)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	40%

Selected Abstracts

When the British ,Tommy' went to war, public opinion followed

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2005
Paul Baines
This article seeks to outline how public opinion changed over the course of the government's announcement of 2nd Gulf War in Iraq until the scandal over the alleged ,sexed-up' Downing Street intelligence dossier. Using quantitative analysis of opinion poll data, together with in-depth interviews with journalists to show how the media were complicit in providing a positive spin for the government's stance on war, the authors conclude that the positive change in public opinion once the British soldiers were deployed occurred through one of the following mechanisms: 1) a patriotic effect, 2) government communication expertise and the management of a complicit news media, 3) the public basked in the reflected glory of the initially successful military or 4) some combination of the above. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Exit polling in a cold climate: the BBC,ITV experience in Britain in 2005

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY: SERIES A (STATISTICS IN SOCIETY), Issue 3 2008
John Curtice
Summary., Conducting an exit poll to forecast the outcome of a national election in terms of both votes and seats is particularly difficult in Britain. No official information is available on how individual polling stations voted in the past, use of single-member plurality means that there is no consistent relationship between votes and seats, electors can choose to vote by post and most of those who vote in person do so late in the day. In addition, around one in every six intended exit poll respondents refuses to participate. Methods that were developed to overcome these problems, and their use in the successful 2005 British Broadcasting Corporation,Independent Television exit poll, are described and evaluated. The methodology included a panel design to allow the estimation of electoral change at local level, coherent multiple-regression modelling of multiparty electoral change to capture systematic patterns of variation, probabilistic prediction of constituency winners to account for uncertainty in projected constituency level shares, collection of information about the voting intentions of postal voters before polling day and access to interviewer guesses on the voting behaviour of refusals. The coverage and accuracy of the exit poll data are critically examined, the effect of key aspects of the statistical modelling of the data is assessed and some general lessons are drawn for the design and analysis of electoral exit polls. [source]

Race and the Recall: Racial and Ethnic Polarization in the California Recall Election

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2008
Gary M. Segura
In the 2003 recall election in California, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante received more than 1.25 million fewer votes in the replacement election than votes cast against the recall of Gray Davis. A much smaller group voted "yes" on the recall but voted for Bustamante. The principal underlying explanation is racial and ethnic polarization. Using L.A. Times exit poll data, we compare the characteristics of voters who displayed the two unusual behavioral patterns with those who voted in more conventional ways. We find that Latinos and African Americans are far less likely than non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans to have defected from Bustamante given a "no" vote on the recall, and far more likely to have voted for Bustamante given a potentially strategic "yes" vote on the recall. The patterns of defection are consistent with racial polarization on Proposition 54, lending further credence to our claim that race and ethnicity persists as an important factor in vote choice, even in environments with a history of minority electoral success. [source]

Constitutionalism and credibility in reforming economies1

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 3 2006
Raj M. Desai
D72; D73; P20; P26 Abstract There has been relatively little investigation of the effect of constitutional transformations on the economic transition in post-communist countries. We develop a simple signalling model in which constitutionalism , a commitment to limit political power and provide judicial defence of basic rights , reinforces the credibility of pro-market candidates' electoral promises and boosts public support for economic reforms. These findings are tested using opinion poll data on public support for reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet Union, in the 1990s. In a two-stage procedure we show that public support for market reforms is higher in countries where incumbents have taken deliberate steps to increase political accountability and judicial independence. Public support also spurs actual economic reform. [source]

Forecasting Seats from Votes in British General Elections

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 2 2005
Paul F. Whiteley
This article develops a forecasting model of seat shares in the House of Commons applied to general election outcomes. The model utilises past information about party seat shares, together with data from the polls gathered prior to the election, to forecast the number of seats won by the parties. Once it has been estimated the model will be used to make a forecast of the outcome of a possible general election in May 2005. The article starts by focusing on research into translating votes into seats, or the cube rule and its modifications. It then goes on to develop the forecasting model, which is based on electoral and poll data from 1945 to 2001. [source]