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ABSTRACT A report into indigenous Australian children taken from their families recommended that the Government apologize. Three polls on the question of whether the Government should apologize produced three quite [...]

The distinction between polling and public relations—publicizing particular angles, setting expectations, and encouraging certain actions—is problematic. So, too, the assumptions that accurate predictions depend on pollsters asking unbiased questions, and that opinion polls are miniature referendums. The attempt to predict the outcome of the 1951 referendum on communism in Australia by Roy Morgan’s Gallup Poll illustrates these points. Morgan, wanting the referendum to pass, framed the issue accordingly. But he also thought the Government’s framing offered the best basis for predicting the result. Opponents reframed the issue and the referendum was defeated. This article, in exploring the relationship between polling and public relations, analyses Morgan’s questions, his forecasts, and his explanations for predicting the wrong result. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Long gone are the days when the survey research community might have heeded scholar Alasdair Maclntyre's warning, in an essay on whether a science of comparative politics was possible, about the difficulties of `comparing attitudes independently of institutions and practices'; of the dangers, for example, of assuming that when one asks Italian, German, and English respondents to say nothing of Algerian, Jordanian, and Russian respondents about the pride they take in their governments, the concept of `pride' is one for which there is a shared, cross-cultural, understanding. Before the war in Iraq and after the fall of the regime, news media and polling organizations in North America, Britain, and Europe coordinated public opinion surveys on the war and related issues across various parts of the globe North and South, East and West though with a heavy bias towards the 39 `older democracies' and an even heavier bias away from the 62 `non-democracies', the number of countries chosen from the 43 newer democracies and 47 semidemocracies' falling somewhere in between.

A report into indigenous Australian children taken from their families recommended that the Government apologize. Three polls on the question of whether the Government should apologize produced three quite different results: a ‘yes’, a ‘no’ and one which was more evenly divided. This paper shows why this happened. It relates the results to three quite different understandings of what opinion polls should model: opinion expressed through plebiscites; ‘real’ opinion; and opinion based on some sort of deliberation. And it explores the relationship between what a poll-following Prime Minister might have done and scholarly judgments about ‘quality’ in public opinion polls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]