A recent Pew poll says that they are. According to Pew, "at least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia." Indeed, the news is grim. The public release informs us that,...
This is a guest post by Idean Salehyan. There has been a lot of hand-wringing and debate lately as to whether or not academics are engaged enough with important policy questions (See Nicholas...
Two recent polls on abortion provide yet another demonstration of lack of adequate care in designing and reporting on polling results. Conservatives are furious about a Washington Post poll for its...
It was sort of sad watching conservatives play the same game that we did in 2004. Poll aggregation + 1; bubblethought -15.
This week, a number of high-profile journalists and bloggers are engaged in a debate about presidential persuasion. Among other examples, they have been discussing the George W. Bush administration's selling of the Iraq war -- leading political scientists at the The Monkey Cage to weigh in with data and useful analysis.Much of the discussion about the Iraq war centers around this chart, which details the contours of support for the war based on party identification.I left the following in comments, but wanted to add key links:The Bush administration really starting selling war in late August...
"A unique anniversary is upon us. Seventy-five years ago today -- Oct. 20, 1935 -- the Gallup Poll published its first official release of public opinion data.Here we are three-quarters of a century later, still working to fulfill the mission laid out in that first release: providing scientific, nonpartisan assessment of American public opinion.The subject of that first release? Well, given the fact that 1935 was smack dab in the middle of the Depression, it may come as no surprise that the topic focused on public opinion about “relief and recovery,” or in other words, welfare. President...
I am usually a fan of Charles Blow's work, but his latest op-ed seems to me a bit sloppy.Blow claims that one reason Democrats, and President Obama in particular, may be having trouble convincing the country to sign on to large-scale health care reform is due to the public's overall lack of trust in the government. This is a completely plausible hypothesis and one that I agree with, as the numbers regarding trust are incredibly low right now (~20%). What I take issue with is the way Blow points out a "peculiar quirk of recent American politics"; namely, that American's trust in government...
When a polling organization conducts a mere 300 interviews each day for a national tracking poll, this is what you get: the potential for one day of outlier polling to produce phony movement. Or, to quote Brad DeLong (who we really should be linking to more):...the Diageo/Hotline Tracking Poll [is] an undersampled daily poll designed to produce a whole bunch of spurious three-day climbs in one candidate's relative vote share followed by a three-day decline so that reporters can trick readers into thinking that there are important pieces of news and trends in there.Anyone want to bet on how...
Parade magazine's straw poll asks: "Does the UN still matter?"Right now, the vote is running just about 60/40.That's 59% no, 41% yes, as of this moment.While more scientific polling also reveals a lot of skepticism about the UN's ability to work well, public polling results also typically indicate significant public support for making the UN work better. Update 6/30/07: It's 72% no, 28% yes tonight.