POLS206 8 5 LECTURE 18 KIND OF POLLS Internet Polls o Samples obtained via subscribed respondents or advertising o Better response rates o Relatively Cheap o Avoid interviewer bias o Easy to allow for and code open ended responses to questions o Are the representative Considerable debate o Probably the future of polling HOW POLLING RELATES TO VOTING Polling allows us to predict explain election results well Election outcomes are usually very similar to contemporaneous polling Some common polling questions are particularly useful o Presidential Approval Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as President Strongly related to vote choice Presidents much below 50 rarely win re election Presidents about 50 rarely lose re elections Commonly asked on surveys Easy break down by state Easy to study over time o The generic Congressional Ballot If the election were held today would you vote for the Republican or Democrat in your district state Allows comparisons of support for members of congress by party across districts and states Very helpful for forecasting explaining aggregate Congressional election results When DEM or GOP REP are ahead by more than a few points this can indicate an impending wave election The republicans democrats are really going to do well this year based on who s ahead o Head to Head Questions Similar structure for asking about House Senate races Asks respondents to choose b t competing candidates For president congress etc Also good at predicting results BUT voters must know candidates which is not always the case with unknown challenges in House Senate races for them to be useful How the undecided vote can determine election outcomes sometimes these people are a sizably important group CHALLENGES AND PROBLEMS IN POLLING Nonattitudes o A specific survey response given when the respondent actually doesn t have an opinion o Can occur when respondents don t want to say don t know or no opinion b c they don t want to appear ignorant o Can be a problem especially if people are asked about very complicated policies they don t understand or haven t heard of or candidates that they haven t heard of before Defining the CHOICE Set o How should you decide the choices that you offer to people to answer a question o Maybe using deliberation among survey designers or in response to focus groups o But more complicated than you might think o ISSUES TO THINK ABOUT Do you want to offer people very different choices that aren t designed to be ranked or scaled or those that are What are the commonly held positions on this issues Not always obvious think of abortion Do we want to allow open ended responses o Looking at Sub Groups and size of Sub groups Most polls have b t 500 2 000 respondents with an average around 1 000 This provides sufficient sample size for inference for the target population as a whole Not always the case if you want to look at a sub group within the target population EXAMPLE You have a 1 000 person survey of all American adults with lots of questions about politics and want to examine the relationship b t foreign policy views and partisanship among Jewish Americans Assuming you have a representative sample you probably only have 20 25 jews jews are 2 1 of the American population You cant do a very advance statistical analysis with only 20 25 jews o Word Choice and Survey Pretesting How you word surveys matter A LOT even with small changes It s not always obvious how in advance You have to be careful not to bias your results with word choice To be sure of any uncertain working your survey you should pre test it Using survey experiments or in a computer lab ARE THERE MEDIA EFFECTS ON VOTING For a long time there was a debate in POLS over whether the media mattered in influencing voting and election outcomes It can be challenging to study media effects so this debate wasn t resolved for awhile o This is partially b c the best tools for studying media effects are lab experiments and content analysis but these tools weren t common 20 years ago o Today they are common o Let me explain how media lab experiments story of pens vs hand sanitizer and content analysis work o So does media matter for voting and elections YES How does the media matter o PRIMES the issues that effect vote choice Here Primes meaning puts these ideas at the top of peoples heads on the tips of their tongues so that they are thinking about recall these o Sets the issue agenda of what the candidates compete over o May influence answers to most important national problem questions Answers to this question are often related to election outcomes o FRAMES ISSUES choosing how they are portrayed o Affects what political facts people know The media also affects how candidates are portrayed o Ex AL GORE was boring George W Bush was stupid Obama was is cool This can be good bad for candidates If you use the media poorly as a candidate it can wreck your campaign o EX 2010 DE Senate Candidate Christine O Donnell REP who poorly confronted accusations that she had once experimented with witchcraft o Media portrayals are not necessarily inaccurate Bill Clinton actually did stop unannounced in fast food places and talked policy in ways regular people could understand The Media Also o Shapes how voters view the economy o Affects Policy mood on racial policy o Created linkage b t race and welfare policies in public mind o May have some effect on voter preferences due to biased reporting You hear lots of talk lamenting negative ads in media o Are they really so bad Geers view HE likes negative ads Negativity allows challenge of opposing claims Negative Ads create accountability Public needs to know bad things about candidates o GEER 2006 Positive ads are difficult to challenge EX Its hard to argue a candidate does not bring New Leadership Negative Ads usually need to be backed up with facts to be credible As a result negative ads bring more info to voters than positive ads Public hates negative ADS BUT while people often don t like negative ads in general usually what they think of when they say they don t like them is negative character attacks not negative issue ads The of negative character ads in presidential campaigns has not increased over time There are more negative issue ads now b c the parties are more polarized Negative issue ads are valuable b c they help draw distinctions and give the public a choice 08 05 2013 08 05 2013