Public Opinion Polls Research Articles

Coverage of Public Opinion Polls: Journalists’ Perceptions and Readers’ Responses

ABSTRACT This project examines news coverage of public opinion polls and explores whether journalists and readers are familiar with best practices in this domain. Study 1 tests the effects of related errors on readers’ perceptions, and Study 2 asks journalists to reflect upon this kind of coverage. Readers (N = 495) only noticed errors when they were very frequent, and many did not assess stories differently based on the presence of errors. Journalists (N = 51) acknowledged that this coverage often contains errors, and many identified individual and structural causes. Taken together, this suggests the need for additional training in polling and numeracy for journalists and audiences. Such efforts could improve news articles about public opinion polls, as well as readers’ ability to recognize and seek out stronger coverage.

Social Representations of the Family Among Russian School-Girls and All-Girls Education: Field Quasi-Experimental Research

The objective of this article is to analyze of the effect of the secondary education segregated by gender on social concept of “family” among schoolgirls. The approach used is social constructivism and the method is field quasi experiment. Secondary education segregated by gender is a social phenomenon in Russia. Public opinion polls show that people use the virtually same arguments pro and against it. At the same time there is a correlation between such forms of education and educational achievements in gender sensitive disciplines. Higher professional education segregated by gender is usually related to getting a qualification in the army mainly by young men. Some personality traits and peculiarities of interpersonal relationships among members of the army (including female students) were brought to light. Lastly, some peculiarities of parent-child relationships and some personality patterns among children from families of professional army men were examined. There are two strict definitions of family in Russian research. It’s not obvious, though, how they correspond with social perceptions of it by ‘people on the streets’, especially girls planning to have a family of their own. Today there are a number of surveys on social perceptions of family among unmarried young people (including girls). The results, though, are not comparable with each other and not always methodically correct. The empirical data allows to make the following conclusions: girl’s education segregated by gender, when it is analyzed as an independent variable, predetermined peculiarities of their social representation about family that are better aligned with S. I. Golod’s definition of family and are normative (prepotency of blood relative bond and nuclear families). It must be noted that a number of social communities, though, are also figuratively perceived as family and on the whole (non-)familial communities have “softer” evaluation. The correlation between discovered social representations of family and features of parent/child relationships needs more research.

'Who wants to silence us'? Perceived discrimination of conspiracy theory believers increases 'conspiracy theorist' identification when it comes from powerholders - But not from the general public.

We examined how individuals who may be labelled 'conspiracy theorists' respond to discrimination against 'conspiracy theorists'. In line with the Rejection-Identification Model (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 135, 1999), we hypothesized that perceived group-based discrimination against conspiracy theorists would strengthen identification with the 'conspiracy theorist' ingroup. We propose that this relationship might be mediated by meta-conspiracy beliefs, that is, the belief that the discrimination of conspiracy theorists is itself a conspiracy. Three studies (Ns=97, 364, 747) among participants who had been labelled as 'conspiracy theorist' in the past (Studies 1 and 2) or who had been labelled as such at the beginning of the experiment (Study 3) revealed robust positive relationships between perceived discrimination of conspiracy theorists, meta conspiracy beliefs, and identification. Furthermore, in Studies 2 and 3, identification was strongly associated with positive intergroup differentiation and pride to be a conspiracy theorist. However, there was no evidence that a manipulation of discrimination with bogus public opinion polls affected 'conspiracy theorist' identification or meta-conspiracy beliefs. A Bayesian internal meta-analysis of the studies returned moderate (for group identification) to strong (for meta-conspiracy beliefs) support for the null hypothesis. In contrast, in Study 3, a manipulation of discrimination by powerholders enhanced both identification and meta-conspiracy beliefs. This suggests that the source of discrimination moderates the causal relationship between perceived discrimination of conspiracy theorists and group identification.

The Route to Health: China’s Belt and Road Initiative in COVID-19 Pandemic

This study examines the China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has created new parameters for building the world order, putting forward life and health as the main values.Aim. The study aims to analyze the Health Silk Road project as a Belt and Road’s important part which, according to the Chinese government’s statements, seeks to improve the health systems and health of the population of the participating countries.Tasks. The author traces the genesis of the Health Silk Road project; describes the main measures taken by China within the framework of this initiative since the spring of 2020; determines its significance for the PRC’s domestic and foreign policy; analyzes the main benefits and risks for the project participants.Methods. When working with scientific literature on the development of the Belt and Road Initiative under pandemic conditions, methods of critical and comparative analysis are applied. The author also analyzes the primary sources — statistical data, government documents, analytical materials, speeches by officials, papers of integration unions and international organizations, public opinion polls, etc.Results. The demand for humanitarian (medical) cooperation at the present stage is substantiated; the PRC’s “mask diplomacy” and its importance for domestic and foreign policy, including impact on the image of the State, are characterized; the opinions of Western experts are analyzed; the assessment of the Build Back Better World Initiative undertaken by G7 countries as a “democratic alternative” to the Chinese project is given.Conclusion. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the flexibility of China’s policy, which was able to adapt to the unstable international situation, find new opportunities and development vectors, including the Health Silk Road, which is likely to remain a significant direction of the Belt and Road Initiative in a post-COVID-19 world.

Distributive Justice and Legal Regulation of Social Security

The building of social security models should be based on the principles of justice that are predetermined and recognized by society. Chaotic reforms without a common vision of the system in accordance with the principles of justice lead to complication, closeness of systems and a sense of insecurity. Since social security is primarily a matter of access to benefits, the state should clearly define the criteria of distributive justice: to whom, to what extent, at whose expense. Public opinion polls sometimes demonstrate that the existing mechanisms of redistribution do not correspond to the idea of justice in society. Throughout the 20th century, the systems were built and improved on the basis of the principle of solidarity of generations, insured, sick and healthy… Currently, due to the crisis of existing models, for many reasons, the old ones are being rethought and new construction options are being tested. They range from extremely liberal, with minimization of social guarantees, to the introduction of a universal basic income. In the Russian Federation, after experiments in pension provision and the introduction of a funded element, which did not show its effectiveness and caused the rejection of society, in 2020 the state fixed the principle of generational solidarity in the Basic Law of the country as the basis for building pension systems. It is equally important to ensure distributive justice in such a resource-intensive and individually unpredictable area as medical care. It is necessary to ensure that the system meets the expectations of citizens in an area where the principle of merit-based provision (meritocratic principle) does not always work. At the same time, the key point is the choice of the organizational and legal form of social security. Despite the opinion expressed about greater compliance with the principles of fairness of the budget model of medical care, it is concluded that there is a need for a broad discussion of reforming the healthcare system with the involvement of experts, the professional community of doctors, patient organizations, etc.

“The right to voice your opinions”: A historical case study in audience members’ emotional hostility to radio journalists

A focus on political consensus in the United States in the early 1950s has created a false sense of a period of national unity and of the press in that period as a trusted institution. This article uses listener hate mail to radio reporters during a divisive moment—President Harry Truman’s removal of General Douglas MacArthur from his command in the Korean War in April 1951—to identify a politically rancorous discourse, aimed at the press. This period of high emotion for Americans provides a case study in audience members’ sometimes hostile relationship with journalists and does so at an early moment in the creation of a truly mass national news audience. I analyze hundreds of unpublished, archival letters, from a time when public opinion polling was relatively new and still problematic, to rethink what our baseline measurement is for media trust and better contextualize claims about its trajectory. I find three tropes that are especially resonant in the present day and became more visible parts of the public discourse with the presidency of Donald Trump: anti-press attitudes, isolationism, and antisemitism.

Troll and divide: the language of online polarization.

The affective animosity between the political left and right has grown steadily in many countries over the past few years, posing a threat to democratic practices and public health. There is a rising concern over the role that "bad actors" or trolls may play in the polarization of online networks. In this research, we examined the processes by which trolls may sow intergroup conflict through polarized rhetoric. We developed a dictionary to assess online polarization by measuring language associated with communications that display partisan bias in their diffusion. We validated the polarized language dictionary in 4 different contexts and across multiple time periods. The polarization dictionary made out-of-set predictions, generalized to both new political contexts (#BlackLivesMatter) and a different social media platform (Reddit), and predicted partisan differences in public opinion polls about COVID-19. Then we analyzed tweets from a known Russian troll source (N=383,510) and found that their use of polarized language has increased over time. We also compared troll tweets from 3 countries (N=79,833) and found that they all utilize more polarized language than regular Americans (N=1,507,300) and trolls have increased their use of polarized rhetoric over time. We also find that polarized language is associated with greater engagement, but this association only holds for politically engaged users (both trolls and regular users). This research clarifies how trolls leverage polarized language and provides an open-source, simple tool for exploration of polarized communications on social media.

Contagious populists: The impact of election information shocks on populist party preferences in Germany

This study analyzes the role of social contagion in populist party support. Although the emergence of the German right-wing populist AfD was accompanied by controversial debates about the social acceptability of its nationalist program, electoral support has followed a clear upward trend. We analyze the impact of information shocks with respect to aggregate-level support for the AfD on individual vote intentions. Unexpectedly high aggregate support for a populist party may indicate a higher social acceptance of its platform and reduce the social desirability bias in self-reported vote intentions. Consequently, the likelihood that an individual will reveal an AfD vote intention increases. We test this mechanism in an event-study approach, exploiting quasi-random variation in survey interviews conducted around the time of German state elections. We define election information shocks as deviations of actual AfD vote shares from pre-election polls and we link these shocks to an individual’s likelihood of reporting an AfD vote intention in subsequent survey interviews. Our results suggest that exposure to higher-than-expected AfD support significantly increases the probability of reporting an AfD vote intention by up to 2.7 percentage points. Testing alternative mechanisms, we find that this increase is in fact driven by reduced reputational concerns associated with expressing populist support.

Hesitancy of COVID-19 vaccine in a working-age population in a town in Central Maharashtra in Western India: A survey based on vaccine characteristics

PurposeAssessments of public sentiments and opinion polls on vaccinations recommend that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is globally expanding; nonetheless, the usefulness of opinion polls to plan mass vaccination campaigns for vaccines and to gauge acknowledgment in a country's populace is restricted. Hence, we aimed to evaluate the impacts of vaccine characteristics, information on herd immunity, and general medical practitioner (GP) recommendation on vaccine hesitancy in a working-age population in Kolhapur, a town in Central Maharashtra in Western India.Methods & MaterialsIn this survey, adults aged 18-64 years residing in Kolhapur, with no history of SARS-CoV-2 infection, were randomly selected in April-2021. Participants completed a questionnaire on their background and vaccination behavior-related variables, and were then randomly assigned according to a full factorial design to one of three groups to receive differing information on herd immunity and to one of two groups regarding GP recommendation of vaccination. Participants then completed a series of eight discrete choice tasks designed to assess vaccine acceptance or refusal based on hypothetical vaccine characteristics, risk of serious side-effects, location of manufacture, and place of administration. Responses were statistically analyzed.ResultsResponses were collected from 843 working-age adults, of whom 163 (19.33%) opted for no vaccination (outright vaccine refusal) and 680 (80.66%) did not. Here, outright vaccine refusal was associated with a lower perceived severity of COVID-19, whereas vaccine hesitancy was lower when herd immunity benefits were communicated and in working versus non-working individuals, and those with experience of COVID-19. For a mass vaccination campaign involving mass vaccination centers and communication of herd immunity benefits, our results predicted outright vaccine refusal in 23.6% (95% CI 19•7-28•4) of the Kolhapur working-age population. Predicted hesitancy was highest for vaccines manufactured in China with 50% efficacy and a 1 in 10,000 risk of serious side-effects (vaccine acceptance 27•4% [26•8-28•0]), and lowest for a vaccine manufactured in the USA with >90% efficacy and a 1 in 1,00,000 risk of serious side-effects (vaccine acceptance 73•6% [69.6-78•1]).ConclusionCOVID-19 vaccine acceptance depends on the characteristics of vaccines and the national vaccination strategy, amongst various other factors, in the working-age population in Kolhapur.

Compliance with Professional Standards when Disclosure of Data from Sociological Surveys

The article presents a comparative analysis of the established and applied professional standards in the publication of data from sociological research, with an emphasis on public opinion polls. This analysis is oriented in three directions: 1) description of the professional standards of some international associations, which lay the foundations for the application of ethical principles and the observance of such standards in the field of public opinion polls; 2) monitoring the discussion of the Bulgarian professional community and in particular the activity of the Bulgarian Sociological Association, related to the approval of patterns of professional standards when publishing data from pre-election surveys; 3) analysis of the Bulgarian research agencies’ publications results of pre-election surveys in the period 2014 – 2021 through a prepared monitoring tool, seeking an answer to the question: to what extent is it legal and in accordance with the professional standards the presented and published data from sociological (pre-election) research in the election campaigns periods. It is monitored whether and in what way the research agencies and centers present the passport of the research, the results of which are announced. The main monitoring indicators are derived from the Electoral Code, the codes of ethics and statements of ESOMAR, BSA, BAMOR and ABRO and include: contracting authority, contractor, financing, passport in a box, margin of error, period of conduct, sample –volume, method, representativeness, method of information registration, percentage of non-respondents, weighting, comparability, wording of the question, indicated base of the shown shares for the individual parties and place of publication.

Descriptive Representation, Judicial Nominations, and Perceptions of Presidential Accomplishment

ABSTRACT Some narratives claim that American presidents can increase their approval ratings by nominating members of underrepresented groups to positions within the judiciary. Indeed, public opinion polls frequently show that members of the public think presidents should consider individuals from underrepresented groups when making judicial appointments. Despite the prevalence of these narratives, little research investigates how the descriptive characteristics of judicial appointments influence public evaluations of the president. We find that the public views presidents more favourably when they are more inclusive of women and minorities in their judicial appointments, and this effect is particularly strong for Democrats. The results demonstrate that presidents can increase public support by appointing individuals from underrepresented groups. This research has implications for representation and judicial selection in the United States.

The Religions Zionist Sector at Bay

In the last decades Religious Zionism moved from the margins to the center of Israeli society and politics. Members of this sector (RZS) are located today in top positions in Israeli politics, businesses, and among professional elites, academia, and the military, gaining growing influence over the national decision-making processes and policies. No wonder, then, that public opinion polls indicate that the members of the RZS are the most satisfied and optimistic in Israel today. The fact that the RZS is positioned mostly on one side of the political spectrum (Right), the tight interrelations within this sector and its widening periphery have further increased its national impact. It is argued here that this is a critical development in Israeli politics as this sector’s members, and in particular those voting for the RZS parties, show relatively low commitment to core democratic values together with a clear preference for the Jewish aspect over the democratic aspect of the state of Israel. Furthermore, whereas in the past the RZS was politically represented by one main party (with some splinter groups coming and going), in the 2021 elections two parties (Yamina and the Religious Zionist Party (RZP)) collided head-on. For the first time each of these parties, the first more modernist and the second more fundamentalist, claimed to be the only authentic representative of this sector. The competition between them intensified when the election results showed that each of the two had gained the same number of seats in the Knesset, with the leader of Yamina unexpectedly becoming the new Israeli prime minister. It is argued here that the future balance of power between these two parties and their respective constituencies will determine the future of the RZS as a whole—whether it will establish itself as a pivotal actor in Israeli politics or remain at the margins.

Welfare-improving misreported polls

We introduce an electoral pollster in the canonical pivotal voting model and show that the misreporting of pre-election poll results can happen even in the absence of partisan motives, as long as reputational concerns are present. By underreporting the expected number of supporters of the most preferred candidate in society, the pollster can induce an election result more likely to be in line with its report. By doing so, not only victory chances of the most preferred candidate rise above 50%, thus breaking the unrealistic neutrality result of the pivotal voting model, but also total election costs are reduced, thus yielding welfare gains and partially offsetting the expected negative effect of polls on welfare (see Goeree and Großer in Econ Theory 31:51–68, 2007; Taylor and Yildirim in Games Econ Behav 68:353–375, 2010). Our model also allows for the simultaneous accommodation of the underdog effect (a feature of pivotal voting models) and the apparently inconsistent bandwagon effect, in the sense that the latter can actually be understood as an illusion due to the possibility of misreporting being overlooked. All of these results hold even as the electorate size grows without bound.

Just Paying Lip Service? Public Trust and Public Support for Armed Forces in Germany

The article presents an empirical analysis of whether, how, and why people are active to either support or protest against the Bundeswehr. Public opinion polls consistently report high levels of trust in the military. According to the social-psychological approach of participation theory, this trust should lead to corresponding actions. However, the literature on civil–military gaps claims that the majority of people pay mere lip service to soldiers rather than actively support the armed forces. No active support despite high levels of trust? In an effort to empirically test the level and the determinants of the public’s support for and protest against the military, an activity scale was included in a representative opinion poll in Germany. The analyses show that a fairly large part of the German population engages in activities that support the Bundeswehr and that public trust in the military predicts that supportive behavior. Importantly, trust in the armed forces remains a strong predictor of citizens’ activities related to the armed forces even when controlling for numerous other factors. Taken together, these findings contradict the widely shared view of a civil–military gap and instead provide empirical evidence for the social-psychological approach of participation theory.

Knowledge Discovery from Large Amounts of Social Media Data

In recent years, social media analysis is arousing great interest in various scientific fields, such as sociology, political science, linguistics, and computer science. Large amounts of data gathered from social media are widely analyzed for extracting useful information concerning people’s behaviors and interactions. In particular, they can be exploited to analyze the collective sentiment of people, understand the behavior of user groups during global events, monitor public opinion close to important events, identify the main topics in a public discussion, or detect the most frequent routes followed by social media users. As an example of the countless works in the state-of-the-art on social media analysis, this paper presents three significant applications in the field of opinion and pattern mining from social media data: (i) an automatic application for discovering user mobility patterns, (ii) a novel application for estimating the political polarization of public opinion, and (iii) an application for discovering interesting social media discussion topics through a hashtag recommendation system. Such applications clearly highlight the abundance and wealth of useful information in many application contexts of human life that can be extracted from social media posts.

Viewed from Different Engels? Differences in Reactions to “Socialism” as a Policy Label

The supposed popularity of socialism among young Americans has been a trending topic in American political media and campaigns. While evidence from public opinion polls disagrees as to whether socialism is truly gaining in popularity, the use of the term “socialism” has had a profound impact on policy discussions in the media and has featured as a prominent Republican Party strategy in the 2020 election cycle. This gives rise to important questions: How do individuals react to the socialist label? Does the socialist label serve as an ideological or affective signal? Are attacks that frame policies as socialist effective in decreasing policy support? Using original observational and experimental survey data, we find that individuals have strong polarized affective reactions to the socialist label. However, framing popular social welfare policies as socialist is ineffective in undermining popular support. Implications suggest that while framing political policies as socialist may trigger affective polarization, it is likely an ineffective means of political persuasion. As a result, oversaturation of the term in the media may lead to misleading conclusions about both political ideology and individual political behavior.

Coalition inclusion probabilities: a party-strategic measure for predicting policy and politics

AbstractPolicy in coalition governments (a) depends on negotiations between parties that (b) continue between elections. No extant means of predicting policy—bargaining power indices, vote shares, seat shares, polling, veto players or measures of electoral competitiveness—recognizes both of these facts. We conceptualize, estimate and validate the first dynamic measure of parties’ bargaining leverage intended to predict policy and politics. We argue that those parties with the greatest leverage in policy negotiations are those with the highest probability of participating in an alternative government, were one to form. Combining a large set of political polls and an empirical coalition formation model developed with out-of-sample testing, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 21 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. Applications to government spending and to the stringency of environmental policy show leverage from coalition inclusion probabilities to be strongly predictive while the primary alternatives—vote shares, seat shares and polls—are not.

Cognitive cascades: How to model (and potentially counter) the spread of fake news.

Understanding the spread of false or dangerous beliefs-often called misinformation or disinformation-through a population has never seemed so urgent. Network science researchers have often taken a page from epidemiologists, and modeled the spread of false beliefs as similar to how a disease spreads through a social network. However, absent from those disease-inspired models is an internal model of an individual's set of current beliefs, where cognitive science has increasingly documented how the interaction between mental models and incoming messages seems to be crucially important for their adoption or rejection. Some computational social science modelers analyze agent-based models where individuals do have simulated cognition, but they often lack the strengths of network science, namely in empirically-driven network structures. We introduce a cognitive cascade model that combines a network science belief cascade approach with an internal cognitive model of the individual agents as in opinion diffusion models as a public opinion diffusion (POD) model, adding media institutions as agents which begin opinion cascades. We show that the model, even with a very simplistic belief function to capture cognitive effects cited in disinformation study (dissonance and exposure), adds expressive power over existing cascade models. We conduct an analysis of the cognitive cascade model with our simple cognitive function across various graph topologies and institutional messaging patterns. We argue from our results that population-level aggregate outcomes of the model qualitatively match what has been reported in COVID-related public opinion polls, and that the model dynamics lend insights as to how to address the spread of problematic beliefs. The overall model sets up a framework with which social science misinformation researchers and computational opinion diffusion modelers can join forces to understand, and hopefully learn how to best counter, the spread of disinformation and "alternative facts."

The Impact of the Korean and Vietnam Wars on US Foreign and Domestic Politicy

The article compares the two most significant military conflicts of the Cold War era, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, in terms of their impact on US domestic and foreign policy. To this end, they are analysed on eight key parameters (objectives of the war, changes in foreign policy concepts, economic consequences of the war, public opinion, etc.). Unlike numerous studies on the impact of the US on Asian regions and nations, the main thrust of this study is to focus on the reverse impact of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, namely on the ways these conflicts affected the domestic affairs of the US and altered its foreign policy behaviour. The empirical base for the study encompasses declassified White House and Pentagon papers, memoirs of American presidents, public opinion polls, as well as extensive research literature. The authors conclude that, although the war on the Korean Peninsula was one of the hottest points of the Cold War and had a serious impact on the social and political life of the country, it has in fact turned out to be a “forgotten” event in American history. By contrast, the Vietnam War, although it had a significant impact on the public consciousness of Americans, was on the whole largely a local conflict, failed to substantially change the international situation, and could not impede the policy of détente in international relations, which was essential for both the USA and the USSR.

Public opinion in Russia, in the USA and Ukraine about the special operation

The armed special operation of Russia in Ukraine caused an ambiguous reaction of the population of various countries, especially those related to the operation. The article provides data from public opinion polls regarding the special operation in Russia, the United States and Ukraine.