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This analysis focuses on estimation difficulties pollsters had in the primaries in 2008 in light of recent trends in improved polling accuracy in general elections. We consider the series of polls that were conducted in New Hampshire and other states holding primaries, looking at how the dynamics of the primary contest affected polling accuracy in those contests. The data come from published state-level results of public pollsters from the week preceding each primary or caucus for which polls were conducted; all told, we used 258 polls in thirty-six different Democratic events and 219 polls in twenty-six Republican events. The results show that the winner's vote share almost always exceeded the poll share while the race remained competitive, particularly early on in the nomination process. In an unusual perspective made possible by the length of the contest on the Democratic side in particular, this could be observed through most of the primaries; it was not the case in the Republican events after John McCain became the presumptive nominee. The analysis shows there are contextual factors at work that can affect the quality of the estimates that public pollsters make. Measures of momentum and viability affect the estimates differently early in the process compared to later, and there are special factors associated with the insurgent candidacy of Barack Obama that may also have affected the accuracy of the polls. We model these factors, investigate their explanatory power, and discuss the implications for pollsters in future primary sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2004 presidential election campaign provided a venue for a wide variety of polling, and it was not without its controversies. In the end, the final estimates of the preelection polls, the bread and butter of the polling industry, were very good at suggesting it would be a close race, with Bush the likely winner. In historical perspective, the overall performance was above average for the period since 1956. Issues raised in the media leading up to the end of the campaign and the final estimates, however, created some controversy, especially about the likely voter methodology used by different organizations. There were also some anomalies at the end of the campaign as some firms and collaborators ended up producing different estimates of the outcome depending on likely voter definitions or the mode of data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the studies of voter behavior have dealt with voter turnout, but few have looked at other aspects of voting behavior that could be linked to balloting method. A reasonable amount of information has now accumulated about the impact of the shift from polling place elections to voting by mail on turnout, rolloff, drop-off, differences in voting for partisan offices and referenda, and differences in straight-ticket voting. This article analyzes recent time series of voting data in Oregon to assess the impact of the shift in voting method on these issues. The analysis includes data at the state, county, precinct, and individual levels, including individual ballots. The results suggest new criteria for evaluating shifts from one voting method to another that may be applied to other electoral reforms, such as those that will result from the Help America Vote Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project seeks theoretical and methodological advances in the study of political advertising effects during election campaigns. On the theoretical side, we hypothesize that racial cues embedded in standard political advertising appeals, involving taxation and government spending, boost opinion constraint by priming global political ideology. On the methodological side, we replicate a lab experiment in face-toface interviews with a probability sample of a large metropolitan area. Results suggest that subtle race cues do increase issue constraint for "racialized" issues such as welfare, affirmative action, crime policy, and the overall size of government. Constraint of opinions about issues less relevant to race, such as abortion, spending on public schools, universal health care, and raising the minimum wage, does not increase as a result of exposure to racial cues. Global ideology is powerfully primed by implicit racial cues embedded in typical political appeals. Finally, though demographic differences in the samples moderate some effects, the general pattern is highly consistent across the two research settings. Implications for strategic communication during campaigns, group centrism in American elections, and the benefits of methodological pluralism in the study of media effects are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines issues involving the national preelection polls in the U.S. in 2000, including the subset of tracking efforts at the end of the campaign, the state-level election polls and some aggregate data models. The 2000 election campaign saw more polls and more reporting of polls than ever before. The final outcome of the election was very close, decided by .5 percent of the popular vote. Presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote, but George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the U.S. when he was awarded Florida's 25 electoral votes on December 12, 2000 by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. There were 18 organizations that produced a final estimate of the outcome of the election, compared to nine in 1996 and six in 1992. This set of organizations includes those producing final estimates based on data collected as early as October 24, 2000, as well as by using information from some organizations that collected data via the Internet. According to statistical methods used to assess poll accuracy in the past, most of the pollsters did an efficient job in producing their final estimates of the election outcome. One feature that distinguished the final 2000 polls was an increase in their sample sizes compared to previous years.

Many claims are being made about the advantages of conducting surveys on the Web. However, there has been little research on the effects of format or design on the levels of unit and item response or on data quality. In a study conducted at the University of Michigan, a number of experiments were added to a survey of the student population to assess the impact of design features on resulting data quality. A sample of 1,602 students was sent an e-mail invitation to participate in a Web survey on attitudes toward affirmative action. Three experiments on design approaches were added to the survey application. One experiment varied whether respondents were reminded of their progress through the instrument. In a second experiment, one version presented several related items on one screen, while the other version presented one question per screen. In a third experiment, for one series of questions a random half of the sample clicked radio buttons to indicate their answers, while the other haft entered a numeric response in a box. This article discusses the overall implementation and outcome of the survey, and it describes the results of the imbedded design experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses experimental results from a revised question wording that has successfully reduced the levels of overreport and improved the accuracy of self-reports of voting behavior in the U.S. Often survey measurement errors results in overreporting. Two different possible explanations of overreporting have been put forward. One considers overreporting the result of social desirability, in which case the respondents claim that they voted, when they clearly remember that they did not vote, for reasons of self-presentation. The other explanation is the result of memory failure, in which respondents are seen to forward telescope a remote voting experience when reporting that they voted in the most recent election. According to this study, overreporting results from a combined influence of these two reasons. A revised question wording, which encouraged respondents to scrutinize several possible contributions to response error limited combinations of these processes and question wordings based on them, is reported to have successfully reduced the levels of overreport and improved the accuracy of self-reports of voting behavior.

The article discusses the exit poll of 1989 Virginia gubernatorial election. In the contest, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder narrowly defeated his Republican opponent, J. Marshall Coleman, winning by two-tenths of one percentage point. Yet an experienced research firm, Mason-Dixon Opinion Research (MDOR), conducted an exit poll for several television stations in Virginia and Washington, DC, and estimated an easy Wilder victory by a 10-percentage-point margin. This 5-percentage-point discrepancy was outside the bounds of normal sampling error. The 1989 MDOR exit poll raised several interesting methodological questions and prompted a variety of speculations about what might have caused the error. The article points out that the number of interviews in the MDOR poll was not equally distributed across the 10 congressional districts, nor was registrants or actual voters. The results suggest that the estimates from the 1989 Virginia exit poll stemmed from the use of face-to-face interviews conducted in person than from a problematic sample of precincts by congressional district.

This article reports on the annual membership meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), held on My 19, 1989, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Retiring president Phil Meyer presided the meeting. President Meyer called the meeting to order. He announced that Chuck Cowan has expressed his intention to step down as Site Selection Committee chair. He introduced Karen Goldenberg, who has been selected as Associate Site Selection Committee chair by the Executive Council. Meyer reiterated the Council's interest in hearing from volunteers to serve on the committee. He then turned to various Council members for reports of their committees' activities during the past year. In reviewing budgetary matters discussed during the past year, three items were noted. A review had been undertaken of the relative costs of supplying services to foreign members: while the dues structure was not covering the full cost of all these memberships, the Council agreed to continue to provide a small net subsidy to this class of members. Second, a decision was made to invest nonworking AAPOR cash balances in conservative bond funds in order to obtain a higher rate of return than is available in checking accounts. Third, slight revisions will be made to current accounting procedures to reflect better the allocation of funds to projects that continue across multiple fiscal years, such as the allocations to cover the production and printing of the AAPOR history.

This article reports on the results of a series of experiments designed to improve response rates for telephone surveys. In three surveys telephone households were selected using both standard random digit dialing (RDD) techniques and lists of telephone numbers purchased from a commercial firm. In the RDD portions of the samples "cold contact" interviewing methods were used; in the list frame portions advance letters were mailed, and the listed household name was used in the introduction. Experiments were designed to test the effects on response rates of the advance letters and use of the listed household name as a means of establishing rapport. The advance letters increased response rates, but no difference could be attributed to the use of names. The mixture of RDD and list sampling techniques is also used to evaluate the effects of relative response rates on substantive findings. The cost consequences of these dual frame designs are assessed along a number of dimensions, and the cost and error components of these designs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different techniques for respondent selection can affect data quality. These differences can result in variations in the distribution of partisans in preelection surveys, which in turn can have an effect on the distribution of candidate preference. Persistence in trying to interview designated respondents in telephone households increased the number of Republicans in a 1984 sample, and therefore Reagan's margin over Mondale. Such differences in interviewing techniques might account for some of the variations in national preelection estimates of the outcome of the presidential election, and they suggest that caution be used in comparing marginals for party identification from different surveys employing different respondent selection techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the special edition of the journal on topics including race and voting behavior in the U.S. presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, political party identification and voting behavior in the U.S., and estimating election outcomes.

The author reflects on the points of Kurt Lang in his work on the function of public opinion polls. He views on the issues which were not expressed but applicable to the discussion engendered by Lang. Also, the author examines the representativeness of the expressions of public opinion, and its representation in policy or legislation.

Journalists rely on polls as they cover public opinion. In order to provide perspectives within the news stories, journalists frequently quote pundits – expert and partisan – who evaluate the methodological quality and implications of the numbers. While partisan pundits might attack unfavorable polls as biased and even fake, experts typically provide rational assessments of methodological quality; news readers may also encounter critiques of the reliability of polls in general in op-eds. How do Americans evaluate polls when they come accompanied with such commentaries? Building on evidence that individuals perceive polls in biased ways, this study examines whether and how individuals react to pundit commentary and whether such commentary can increase or decrease partisan bias in evaluations. In a nationally representative survey experiment fielded during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we exposed 2,078 individuals to news stories about polls that included various expert or partisan comments. Although commentaries shifted perceptions of the polls, they did little to mitigate or amplify news readers' biases. We conclude that poll commentary is not an effective tool for mitigating bias. Implications for public perceptions, corrective attempts against biased processing of statistical information in news reports, and journalistic coverage at large are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study leverages a survey experiment in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election to evaluate how partisan biases, poll results, and their methodological quality interact to shape people's assessments of polling accuracy and electoral expectations. In a nationally representative sample, we find that individuals disproportionately find polls more credible when their preferred candidate is leading. Partisan biases are mitigated when the polls themselves vary in objective indicators of quality: while more educated respondents are more likely to identify high-quality polls accurately, low education respondents' bias was reduced when they encountered polls with varying methodological quality. Finally, these moderators influence respondents' electoral expectations as well. We discuss the implications for journalistic coverage of polls, public opinion, and political polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the volume 21, number four issue of the "International Journal of Public Opinion Research," including one on the impact of Internet use in China on the basis of three surveys conducted in 2003, 2005, and 2007 in a set of major metropolitan areas, another on a longitudinal analysis of the shifting levels of political knowledge in the Danish electorate, and another one on a comparative analysis of journalists' views concerning the use of polls in their work.

The author reflects on the developments of the "International Journal of Public Opinion Research." It views on the accomplishments of Wolfgang Donsbach during his period as managing editor of the journal which contributed a higher growth of the journal. Also, the author cites the nomination of professor Peter Neijens for the journal's editor.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Silke Adam on how and why European issues are debated differently in different countries and another by Wayne Wanta and Yusuf Kalyango Jr. on the coverage of twenty African nations in the U.S. media.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one about the hostile media perception in the regulated press system and another on how genes and the environment affect behavioral characteristics.

The article discusses the topics published within the issue, including one on the effectiveness of inoculation strategies in Taiwan and another on the evaluation of the concept of opinion leaders to rural South Africa.

This article presents an introduction to the volume 19, number 1, 2007 issue of "International Journal of Public Opinion Research."

How do citizens' motivations shape their perceptions of poll reports? Increasingly, scholars are finding that citizens engage in motivated reasoning, whereby they discredit information that differs from their preexisting attitudes. The perceived credibility of opinion polls might be prone to similar motivational processes, as individuals could discount results suggesting that they hold minority opinions. We assess whether motivated reasoning influences the credibility of poll results and whether features of the presentation of those results might moderate and potentially counteract these motivational processes. In an online survey experiment conducted with a national sample of American adults (N = 1,211), respondents were exposed to poll reports about both gun control and abortion and were asked to rate the credibility of these polls. For each report, three aspects of presentation were randomized: the direction of the poll result (majority supports/opposes), the news source reporting the poll (FoxNews/MSNBC), and the amount of methodological detail reported (none/a lot). In line with theories of motivated reasoning, respondents who held issue positions that contradicted the results of the polls found those polls less credible. Further, this decreased credibility was particularly evident among individuals with high levels of political knowledge. Source credibility cues--such as the ideological alignment of source and respondent and the presence of a message from an unexpected source--did not moderate this relationship and were unrelated to poll credibility. However, evidence suggests that methodological disclosure could moderate the motivational biases in credibility assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems in the 2000 presidential election, especially in Florida, initiated a large-scale shift toward new voting technology. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data, we report on the effects of changes in voting systems in Florida and Michigan. The variety of initial conditions and the numerous changes make these excellent case studies. We find that reforms succeeded in reducing the residual vote. Every change from old to new technology resulted in a decline in residual votes that was significantly greater than in areas that did not change voting equipment. The percentage of residual votes in the 2004 presidential race in localities that changed voting systems was well under 1 percent, representing a 90 percent reduction in error in Florida and a 35 percent reduction in Michigan. We run these analyses separately for undervotes and overvotes. Using ecological-inference techniques, we investigate the persistence of residual votes when technology changed and find very little persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election administrators and public officials often consider changes in electoral laws, hoping that these changes will increase voter turnout and make the electorate more reflective of the voting-age population. The most recent of these innovations is voting-by-mail (VBM), a procedure by which ballots are sent to an address for every registered voter. Over the last 2 decades, VBM has spread across the United States, unaccompanied by much empirical evaluation of its impact on either voter turnout or the stratification of the electorate. In this study, we fill this gap in our knowledge by assessing the impact of VBM in one state, Oregon. We carry out this assessment at the individual level, using data over a range of elections. We argue that VBM does increase voter turnout in the long run, primarily by making it easier for current voters to continue to participate, rather than by mobilizing nonvoters into the electorate. These effects, however, are not uniform across all groups in the electorate. Although VBM in Oregon does not exert any influence on the partisan composition of the electorate, VBM increases, rather than diminishes, the resource stratification of the electorate. Contrary to the expectations of many reformers, VBM advantages the resource-rich by keeping them in the electorate, and VBM does little to change the behavior of the resource-poor. In short, VBM increases turnout, but it does so without making the electorate more descriptively representative of the voting-age population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article on the determinants of attitudes toward Muslims in five countries by Richard Wike and Brian J. Grim, the impact of the U.S. political comedy show "The Daily Show" on the attention of television viewers towards political issues by Xiaoxia Cao, and the effects of individual level factors and media frame diversity on audience frames by Huiping Huang.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one on how competing frames set by the U.S. government and by the U.S. media influenced the perception of the issue by the public and facilitated political action, the role of perceptual phenomena in the agenda setting processes, and the interdependence of attitudes with other variables.

This article introduces the journal with a discussion of its contents, which include historical work by Alejandro Moreno and Manuel Sánchez-Castro, empirical research by Francis L. F. Lee, and methodological work by Marek Fuchs.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Jorg Matthes on the impact the need for orientation has on agenda setting and another by Erik Nisbet on political participation.

The article introduces topics in this issue of "International Journal of Public Opinion" such as the accuracy of polls in the 2007 presidential campaign in France, media attention on the 2005 parliamentary elections in Germany, and factors that influence when voting decisions are made.

This article discusses various topics published within the issue including an article on the accuracy of pre-election estimates of election outcomes and an article about public opinion of scientific issues.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Peter Neijens and Philip van Praag on the dynamics of opinion formation in popular referenda in the Netherlands and another by Vincent Price and Natalie Jomini Stroud on the research of public attitudes toward polls in the U.S.

A preface for the September 2006 issue of the periodical is presented.

The article provides an overview of the articles published in the June 2006 issue of the "International Journal of Public Opinion." An article by Patricia Moy looks for priming rather than agenda-setting side effects, that is people's use of features of media coverage for their own decisions. The experience of Norwegian researchers made with telephone panels as an alternative to exit polls on election day is also related. The authors establish an appearance of then president candidate George W. Bush on the television program "The David Letterman Show," changed the criteria viewers used when making decisions on whom to vote for.

The arrival of electronic voting has generated considerable controversy, mostly about its vulnerability to fraud. By comparison, virtually no attention has been given to its usability, i.e., voters’ ability to vote as they intend, which was central to the controversy surrounding the 2000 US presidential election. Yet it is hard to imagine a domain of human–computer interaction where usability has more impact on how democracy works. This article reports a laboratory investigation of the usability of six electronic voting systems chosen to represent the features of systems in current use and potentially in future use. The primary question was whether e-voting systems are sufficiently hard to use that voting accuracy and satisfaction are compromised. We observed that voters often seemed quite lost taking far more than the required number of actions to cast individual votes, especially when they ultimately voted inaccurately. Their satisfaction went down as their effort went up. And accuracy with some systems was disturbingly low. While many of these problems are easy to fix, manufacturers will need to adopt usability engineering practices that have vastly improved user interfaces throughout the software industry. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Electronic voting systems were developed, in part, to make voting easier and to boost voters' confidence in the election process. Using three new approaches to studying electronic voting systems--focusing on a large-scale field study of the usability of a representative set of systems--we demonstrate that voters view these systems favorably but that design differences have a substantial impact on voters' satisfaction with the voting process and on the need to request help. Factors associated with the digital divide played only a small role with respect to overall satisfaction but they were strongly associated with feeling the need for help. Results suggest numerous possible improvements in electronic voting systems as well as the need for continued analysis that assesses specific characteristics of both optical scan and direct recording electronic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines different issues related to the publishing of the "International Journal of Public Opinion Research (IJPOR)." One of the issues that would gain prominence in future is online access to journal articles and its implications for authors' rights and publishers' businesses. The editors of IJPOR have decided on a 24-months embargo on "post-prints." A post-print is defined as the author's final draft of a manuscript as accepted for publication by a journal, but before it has undergone the copy editing and proof correction process. If authors choose to make a version of their accepted article freely available, shortly after the paper is published in a journal, this would obviously hamper journal subscriptions. Several journals are using an online submission system where authors, reviewers, editors and the publisher communicate exclusively via a special web site. The editors of IJPOR have not favored the introduction of such a system, since it was felt that the readiness of referees to review manuscripts might be affected by putting too much burden on them and make it psychologically easier for them to decline by just hitting a "no" button.

Presents an introduction to the March 2005 issue of the "International Journal of Public Opinion Research."

Presents the author's views on the journal "International Journal of Public Opinion Research." Information that according to scholar Edmund Lauf the journal is the most international mass communication journal among more than 40 communication journals; Article on an interesting historical review of a part of sociologist Robert Merton's work related to communication research; Views on other articles published in the journal.

The article reports that the effects of lawmaking on public opinion are not as frequently studied as the restrictions that public opinion puts on legislative initiatives. The latter is the subject of Rachel Meneguello's study of "Government Popularity and Public Attitudes to Social Security Reform in Brazil." She looks at reform measures initiated by President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, and finds that a government supported by the political left can implement reforms in the neo-liberal vein without embarrassing itself or estranging its supporters. The condition is, of course, that the government is a popular one, and that it acts largely in a manner that corresponds to people's expectations. Meneguello's analysis mostly draws on a June 2003 survey of the Brazilian population, but she also looks at the development of Brazilian politics over the last 20 years, and especially at the ups and downs of presidential popularity since 1995. Public opinion research, if it considers the media at all, is accustomed to understand media content as an independent variable in the process of opinion formation.

Presents an introduction to various articles published in the December 2004 issue of "International Journal of Public Opinion Research."