Why Respond to Polls? Public Opinion Polling and Democracy
By Robert Y. Shapiro
As every polling professional knows, public opinion research is under siege... (more)
In Place of Many, One
By Martin Plissner
An old hand at election night broadcasts explains how they became what they are and provides a modest proposal for easing the pain next time... (more)
What's In a Name? Sampling Latinos by Surname
By David Dutwin and Melissa Herrmann
A comparison of Latinos by surname status finds significant concerns with the validity and reliability of this type of sampling procedure... (more)
2005
Echoes of 1800? The 2004 Bush-Kerry Race and the Return of Partisan Politics
By John Kenneth White
It was a tough, competitive election, characterized by vitriolic rhetoric that further polarized an already alienated and exhausted public. (more)
Beyond Belief: Looking at the Less Religious
By John Benson
For heaven's sake, make sure you include a measure of religiousness in any survey that measures political or social attitudes. (more)
Americans Increasingly Choose "No Religion"
By Sid Groeneman and Gary A. Tobin
The number of Americans refusing to place themselves in any denominational category has increased dramatically. If the trend persists, the implications may be felt for generations to come. (more)
Turning Points: Spiritual Transformations Around the World
By Tom W. Smith
Of thirty-two countries surveyed, the United States had the highest percentage of respondents saying they had experienced a turning point in their lives when they had made a new and personal commitment to religion. (more)
Presidential Approval Ratings in Perspective
By Larry Hugick, Jonathan Best, and Stacy DiAngelo
Are the presidential approval ratings of major media polls basically interchangeable, or do they differ in ways that can be quantified? (more)
Neither An In-Law Nor An Outlaw Be: Trends in Americans’ Attitudes Toward Gay People
By Patrick J. Egan and Kenneth Sherrill
In the wake of the 2004 presidential election, it looks as if the gay and lesbian movement has suddenly fallen terribly out of fashion. (more)
The Political is Personal: Same-Sex Marriage and the 2004 Presidential Election
By Susan Pinkus
Acceptance only goes so far, and acceptance of same-sex marriage is over the limit for most Americans. (more)
Charlemagne's Questionnaire: A Little-Known Document from the Very Beginnings of Survey Research
By Thomas Petersen
Why would the King of the Franks and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire take a poll? (more)
Best Foot Forward: Social Desirability in Telephone vs. Online Surveys
By Humphrey Taylor, David Krane, and Randall K. Thomas
Bias can be very substantial when survey respondents are reluctant to tell a human interviewer the socially undesirable, and possibly embarrassing, truth. (more)
Gauging the Election Mandate and the Role of “Moral Values”
By Alvin Richman
Six polls using four question formats offer fresh insights into the debate. (more)
The “Moral Values” Illusion
By George Bishop
So much for the rational voter. (more)
False Consensus: Public (Mis)Estimation of Public Opinion
By Greg M. Shaw
To paraphrase the political adage, what you see depends on where you stand. (more)
All in the Timing: In-the-Field Testing of a Post-Disaster Questionnaire
By Stephanie Willson, Kristen Miller, and Karen Whitaker
Even when a question in no way alluded to the hurricane, answers still reflected respondents' hurricane experience.
“Surfing Alone”: Internet Communities, Public Opinion, and Civic Participation
By Frank Louis Rusciano
Revisiting a website is a poor substitute for a link to a physical place one would die defending. (more)
Ghosts in the Machine: Media Technology and Social Capital
By Brian Jones
Internet time is positively associated with voluntary association—a lot more association. (more)
Political Access: The Internet as a Source of Campaign Information
By Kenneth Winneg and Natalie Jomini Stroud
A great deal of talk about the use of the internet in the 2004 Democratic primary campaign has left many unanswered questions. (more)
What's Next?: The California Governor's Recall and Its Polling Dilemmas
By Mark Baldassare
An almost complete lack of precedent in removing a governor in any state recall election presented big challenges to California pollsters. (more)
To See Ourselves as Others See Us: How Publics Abroad View the United States in the Post-9/11 Era
By Ole R. Holsti
Overwhelming military and economic power may not always yield a comparable level of international influence. (more)
Is the Party Over? Spreading Antipathy Toward Political Parties
By Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon
Growing dissatisfaction with political parties is a general pattern across the advanced industrial democracies. (more)
Liberal or Conservative?: The Measure is the Meaning
By Nat Ehrlich
If you can only ask one question about political orientation, which should it be? (more)
Starting from Scratch: Making Research a Reality in Afghanistan
By Matthew Warshaw
In one survey, the female field team in Kandahar quit en masse on the first day of interviewing. (more)
Deep Suspicion: Iraq, Misperception, and Partisanship
By Yaeli Bloch-Elkon and Robert Y. Shapiro
When the evidence—or the absence of it—contradicted beliefs in WMDs and an Iraq/al-Qaeda link, the public reevaluated its perceptions along distinctly partisan lines. (more)
Categorically Different: Americans and Their Leaders on Foreign Policy Objectives
By Alvin Richman
American leaders and the public are far from united on some foreign affairs issues, including conditions calling for the use of U.S. military force. (more)
Belief vs. Behavior: Religion and Political Party Preference
By Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin
The fact that practicing Catholics are now so Republican shows that a political era has ended. (more)
Among the Amish: Interviewing Unique Populations on Sensitive Topics
By Berwood Yost, Christina Abbott, Jennifer Harding, and Angela Knittle
Researchers working within the United States will encounter few cultures as foreign to them as the Amish. (more)
Sharing the Faith
By Kenneth R. Blake, Robert O. Wyatt, and Holly Warf
How to spot an evangelical, and why they vote as they do. (more)
Weighting It Out: Party Identification and Election 2004
Part one of a three-part series
By Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo
In the 2004 presidential election, harsh criticism of survey methods led to serious charges of partisan bias in major national polls. (more)
“Smart Growth” vs. Sprawl: Findings from the 2004 American Community Survey
By Kate Stewart
What do Americans see as the ideal community? (more)
Switched-On Data: A Need for Standards in Secondary Survey Research
By Thomas R. Marshall
A failure to address concerns about secondary use of data places the credibility of survey research at risk. (more)
"Black Rage" or Conscious Dream?: A Demographic Profile of African Americans' Prejudice
By David C. Wilson
Is the black middle class disillusioned, or do upwardly mobile African Americans still believe in the American dream? (more)
Weighting It Out: Party Identification and Election 2004
Part two of a three-part series
By Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo
The back and forth movement seen in party ID over the course of election year 2004 provides strong evidence that it is not a particularly stable measure. (more)
The "Swift Boat Ads" and the John Kerry Campaign: A Question of Advertising Effectiveness
By Christopher P. Borick
As the ads and counter ads played out, national polls began to show a drop in Kerry's numbers. But was it really cause and effect? (more)
Tough Calls: Potential Nonresponse Bias from Hard-to-Reach Respondents
By Peyton M. Craighill and Michael Dimock
Are respondents in telephone surveys who are more difficult to reach different from those more easily reached? (more)
The Myth of the Disengaged American
By Russell Dalton
Participatory culture appears alive and well in contemporary America. (more)
Weighting It Out: Party Identification and Election 2004
Last part of a three-part series
By Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo
Even if they came close to the actual election results, pollsters’ performance was not improved by flawed assumptions about party ID. (more)
Governor Schwarzenegger Takes His Chances: California's November Special Election
By Mark Baldassare
The outcomes of its special election will surely have implications for California’s elections next year, other states’ policies, and national politics. (more)
Democratic Design: The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Project
By W. Phillips Shively
Background on a crossnational project that explores the interaction between citizens and their nations’ political institutions. (more)
Adventure in Baku
Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski give their in-depth account of the exit polling for the November 6 elections in Azerbaijan. (more)
Conflicted Conservatives: The Politics of Ideological Contradiction in the United States
By Christopher Ellis
Simply put, many conservatives are not very conservative. (more)
The Year of the Flood: The "Strength-of-Personality Scale" and the 2002 German Federal Elections
By Thomas Petersen
When opinion leaders did not lead the vote, was it a sign of a changing society, or the failure of the tool used to identify them? (more)
Legitimacy in the Public Eye: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Public Opinion
By Thomas R. Marshall
Sandra Day O’Connor was among the top justices whose on-the-Court votes reflected poll majorities. (more)
Four Calls or Less: A Dispositional Model of Preelection Polls
By David Dutwin and Melissa Herrmann
Preelection polls in the 2004 election were likely biased toward President Bush. (more)
Political Ignorance Revisited
By Stephen Earl Bennett
Most Americans are out to lunch when it comes to basic information about politics. (more)
Deliberation and Its Discontents
By Frank Louis Rusciano
Deliberative discussions cannot cure all of the ills of postmodern democracy, but they do appear to have potential. (more)
When the Trains Exploded in Madrid: Fear, Anger, Public Opinion, and Government Change
By Kenneth A. Rasinski, Tom W. Smith, and Juan Díez-Nicolás
There were similarities between the Spanish attacks and those of September 11. The political fallout, however, was much different. (more)
Online vs. In-Person: Experiments with Mode, Format, and Question Wordings
By Tom W. Smith and J. Michael Dennis
How comparable can e-surveys be to those utilizing more traditional survey modes? (more)
2006
Not So Simple: The Role of Religion in the 2004 Presidential Election
By Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, and Sarah Dutton
Could religion be diminishing as a factor in presidential vote choice? (more)
Behind the Controversy: A Primer on U.S. Presidential Exit Polls
By Mark Lindeman and Rick Brady
Part I. A Brief History of U.S. Exit Polls
Part II. Exit Polling Methods and Sources of Error
Part III. A Select Bibliography of Exit Polling
The Future of Exit Polling: A Commentary by Warren Mitofsky
From Vietnam to Iraq: Generations Disagree About the Use of Military Force
By Nicole Speulda
In the generation gap over U.S. military interventions, it is older Americans, not young people, who typically show the greatest wariness about using military force. (more)
Changing Minds in the 2004 Election? A Report On Gallup’s Postelection Panel Survey
By Jeffrey M. Jones and Joseph Carroll
A postelection panel survey offers valuable insights into the behavior of American voters. (more)
Four Tiers for America: A Scale of Foreign Attitudes Toward the United States and U.S. Foreign Policies
By Alvin Richman
A four-point scale allows the economical and consistent sorting of foreign publics in terms of their views of U.S. society and foreign policies. (more)
Cele Bune! Managing Overseas Face-to-Face Interview Subcontractors
By Karl Feld
Lurching down a muddy track in the middle of nowhere is a very real scenario for the researcher who chooses the wrong data collection subcontractor. (more)
Short on Confidence: Changes in Attitudes toward American Institutions and Occupations
By Richard Seltzer and Rhea Roper-Nedd
Confidence in American institutions has not rebounded in the nearly twenty years since Lipset and Schneider wrote The Confidence Gap. (more)
Best Form of Government: The Public Image of the Monarchy in Spain
By Juan Díez-Nicolás
For the majority of Spaniards, the choice is not between monarchy and republic, but between dictatorship and democracy. (more)
Memory of the Holocaust: A Seven-Nation Study
Part one of a three-part series
By Tom W. Smith
Testimony of the Holocaust is challenged by the passage of time and waning collective memory. (more)
Can the Supreme Court Lead Public Opinion? A Novel Experiment in Survey Design
By Craig Cummings and Robert Y. Shapiro
Studying elites individually in separate and efficient multiple-ballot experiments can be telling. (more)
What's the Matter with Kids Today?
By Russell Dalton
Survey findings contradict the claim that American democracy is at risk because of its youth. (more)
Behind the Percentages: Insights into American and Middle-Eastern Students’ Views on Terrorism
By Roberta Fiske-Rusciano, Frank Louis Rusciano, and Ibrahim Saleh
With differences this wide, it appeared that no amount of discussion would allow them to reach common ground. (more)
Memory of the Holocaust: A Seven-Nation Study
Part two of a three-part series
By Tom W. Smith
Testimony of the Holocaust is challenged by the passage of time and waning collective memory. (more)
The Data-PASS Project: Preserving the Past of Survey Research
By David L. Weakliem
The goal of Data-PASS is to locate and archive all digital social science data on American society ever produced. (more)
Two-Party Prescription for Winning Seniors: The Medicare Drug Program
By Will Lester
What will be the impact of prescription-drug politics on the midterm elections? Pollsters are caught in the middle between Republican and Democratic perceptions. (more)
No Upper Limit: Relationships and Sexual Health Among Older Americans
By Linda L. Fisher
Baby boomers are changing the face of aging in America. (more)
Memory of the Holocaust: A Seven-Nation Study
Last part of a three-part series
By Tom W. Smith
Knowledge encourages remembrance and teaching about the Holocaust, but its impact on attitudes is mostly indirect. (more)
Most Important Reason: Helping Older Respondents Provide Better Data
By Judith T. Lynch, Anne E. Kenyon, Jean Wang, Stephanie Rizk, Scott Scheffler, Katherine R. Jackson, and Mildred C. Duke
Relatively minor changes in mail survey formatting for open-ended questions can improve the quality of data collected from an older population. (more)
Better Than Approval? Direction of the Country Questions as Predictors of Incumbent Races
By Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo
With the midterm elections less than six months away, the low satisfaction rating prior to the 1994 midterm congressional election is an important statistic to keep in mind. (more)
Mixed Picture: Trends in Public Opinion among Religious Fundamentalists, 1972-2004
By Anne K. Driscoll and Katherine E. Heck
Are fundamentalists’ values indeed moving in a different direction than those of moderates and liberals? (more)
Forgetting People: What’s Wrong with Public Opinion Research Today, and How to Fix It
By Steve Farkas
The biggest menace facing polling is not borne of response rates or the challenges of technology. The real problem is with the very quality of the surveys. (more)
Related Measures: Direction of the Country and Job Approval
By Larry Hugick and Stacy DiAngelo
The key to understanding direction of the country results is determining how they compare with presidential job approval figures. (more)
True Feelings: Strength of Opinion in Death Penalty Decisions
By Robert S. Ross and Edward J. Bronson
Little is known about the dimensions and details of Americans’ attitudes toward the death penalty, largely due to the limited nature of the questions public opinion researchers have been asking. (more)
Today's Top Story: Media, Priming, and Voting in the 2004 Election
By Tsung-Jen Shih and Dietram A. Scheufele
In making political decisions, people use only information that comes to mind most quickly and easily—a phenomenon manipulated by the mass media through priming. (more)
On the Reputation of Political Parties: Emotional Appeal and Competence in a Cross-National Study
By Chris Levy
First of two parts
What can we say about the global health of democracy? The esteem—or lack of it—in which political parties are held is a key indicator. (more)
Slow Progress: AAPOR Standard Definitions and Academic Journals
By Thomas R. Marshall
Standard definitions are of no use to survey researchers if they are not used. How often are AAPOR response rates actually reported?
(more)
Polls Apart on Human Origins
By George Bishop
Taking American public opinion polls at face value, one would think the country’s scientific establishment faced a never-ending culture war with a Christian army of biblical creationists. (more)
On the Reputation of Political Parties: Emotional Appeal and Competence in a Cross-National Study
By Chris Levy
Second of two parts
By using a management tool for measuring the reputations of corporations in the private sector, we can examine possible influences on the reputation of political parties in countries throughout the world. (more)
The "Right" Way to Use Polling Data: What Democrats Need to Do to Win Elections
By Amy R. Gershkoff
Democrats should steal a page from the Republicans' playbook when they use polling data to formulate campaign strategy. (more)
Time in Sample: Searching for Conditioning Effects in a Consumer Panel
By Zachary Arens and Darby Miller Steiger
A lack of evidence for panel conditioning is good news for researchers engaged in longitudinal studies. (more)
Why All the Hoopla? California Governor's Election May Signal National Partisan Shift
By Mark Baldassare
The race between GOP governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic state treasurer Phil Angelides is seen as a test case for the depth of voter dissatisfaction with the GOP (more)
The Iranian Threat: A Foreign Policy Data Presentation
By Alvin Richman
Iran has displaced North Korea this year as the country Americans believe poses the greatest threat to the United States. (more)
"I Can't Imagine It": Survey Research in Post-Katrina New Orleans
By Susan E. Howell and Alicia N. Jencik
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, survey research, as most of us know it in the developed world, was impossible in New Orleans. (more)
Interviewing in the Face of Disaster: Conducting a Survey of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees
By Melissa Herrmann, Mollyann Brodie, Rich Morin, Robert Blendon, and John Benson
The many issues raised included the fact that our respondents were essentially a captive audience, the recent stress in their lives, and the need to ensure respondent and interviewer safety. (more)
Foundations for Public Opinion: Changes In American Core Values, 1961-2001
By John P. Robinson and Steven P. Martin
Survey items used to measure values over the past forty years promise to provide insights into public responses to shorter-term attitude and opinion questions asked in policy and election surveys. (more)
Gambling, Government, and God, Revisited
By John M. Benson, Tina M. Reigel, and Melissa J. Herrmann
Differences in attitudes about gambling give a glimpse of important rifts in American society, especially by measures of religiosity. (more)
Providing Insight at the Speed of Light: The Challenge and Necessity of Embracing Innovation
By Mark Cameron
The most successful survey organizations will be those that are grounded but innovative in their view toward technology. (more)
”Your Opinion Counts”: The Public’s Opinion of Survey Research
By Patrick Glaser
The key to the survey research profession improving its status lies in persuading the unsure 35 percent of the public that participating in polls and surveys is, indeed, in their best interests. (more)
Voters with Clout: Swing Groups Swing the Midterm Elections
By Will Lester
Republicans hoped that terror fears would trump anger over Iraq in the November 2006 elections. Voters weren't buying it. (more)
Framing the Future of Race Relations
By David C. Wilson
Understanding racial progress is vital to realizing the principles of democracy, but a question wording experiment shows the public is very sensitive to how race relations are framed. (more)
Face-Off with Iran: Muslim and Non-Muslim Publics Take Sides
By Alvin Richman
The Muslim publics’ negative view of the American people is a component of the overall U.S. image that is not likely to be easily turned around by shifts in U.S. foreign policy. (more)
Current Issues in Multicultural Survey Methodology
By Johnny Blair and Linda Piccinino
As multicultural surveys become more prevalent, questions of comparability of results, new sources of measurement error, and sampling and nonresponse bias become more pressing. (more)
2007
Why Respond to Exit Polls?
By Robert Y. Shapiro and Lisa Ferraro Parmelee
Thanks to the work of Warren Mitofsky and the other exit pollsters, we have a means of having our votes counted twice—once in the voting booth and once on the way out. (more)
Condemned to Repetition: The 2006 Exit Poll Controversy
By Mark Lindeman
Some are arguing that the 2006 exit polls evinced a "landslide denied"—millions of votes stolen from Democratic candidates around the country. Here we go again. (more)
Why Our Democracy Needs Accurate National Exit Polls
By Paul J. Lavrakas
If there were no reliable national exit poll data gathered and disseminated by a reputable survey organization, our democracy surely would suffer. (more)
Warren in Mexico: Elections Become Citizens' Events
By Ulises Beltrán
One election at a time, the Mexican electoral system gained the trust of the people. (more)
Restoration of Confidence: Polling’s Comeback from 1948
By Stephen Earl Bennett
Those of us who utilize surveys and polls tend to forget how close this field came to coming to an end after the fiasco of the 1948 presidential election. (more)
The Threat of International Terrorism after 9/11: News Coverage and Public Perceptions
By Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro
President Bush and others in the administration have benefited from the generous media coverage of their terror alerts and threat assessments. (more)
Response and Revenge: Terror, Counterterror, and Intolerance
By Bethany Barratt and Christian Erickson
Spikes in hate crimes and discrimination toward Arab Americans occur after violent events that claim American lives, even if the link to immigrants, or to terrorism, is unclear. (more)
Public Opinion: An Ambiguous Reality? A Quick Tour of “the Classics”
By Esteban Lopez-Escobar
Even the most enthusiastic apologists of public opinion occasionally soften their enthusiasm, recognizing in it a certain frailty. (more)
Worth The Cost? A Research Note on Optical Mark Read Technology and Response Rates
By Berwood Yost, Christina Abbott, Jennifer Harding, and Jamie Markel
Despite the OMR survey’s acceptable response rate and 100 percent data entry accuracy, respondent error in completing the OMR form was a severe limitation. (more)
Increasingly Uneasy: Germans' Attitudes toward Islam
By Thomas Petersen
A survey on Germans' attitudes toward Islam finds a process of alienation taking place in the Germans' relationship with both the Islamic world and the Muslim population in Germany. Viewed pessimistically, the current trend can be interpreted as the first step in the spiraling process leading to an open conflict. (more)
The Internet and Democracy in America
By Stephen Earl Bennett
Is the internet a boon for or a bane to democracy? Changes in the internet’s audience indicate that, contrary to the dark murmurings of some, this new technology may be a welcome development. (more)
Questions & Answers: Experts Comment on a Public Opinion Classic
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of public opinion classic Questions & Answers in Attitude Surveys, authors Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser asked seven researchers who have dealt extensively with the question-answer process to give their assessment of progress made since the book was published. Here are their replies. (more)
Questions & Answers: Twenty-Five Years of Relevance
By Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser
An excerpt from Questions & Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Context. (more)
Democracy in Unexpected Places: The Democratic Aspirations of the Afghan Public
By Russell Dalton
The challenges of building a stable democratic state in Afghanistan are tremendous, yet the Afghans themselves display unexpected support. (more)
Outing Valerie Plame: The Boundaries of Scandal and the Press
By Andrea Hickerson
Journalists' role in the Valerie Plame affair was unclear, and it begs the question: What happens to scandal when the producers become players? (more)
Turn of Events: Public Confidence in the Media
By Kellee J. Kirkpatrick and James W. Stoutenborough
The public's lack of confidence in the press appears to be related to a superficial dissatisfaction with current political events, not a deep disaffection. (more)
Practical Challenges: Conducting Survey Research in Afghanistan
By George Varughese
Survey research in Afghanistan involves a number of context-specific, practical challenges that confront researchers at every stage. (more)
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