Public Opinion Surveys Research Articles

Multi-level blame attribution and public support for EU welfare policies

Since the Eurozone crisis, intense political debate has resurfaced about deservingness judgements in European solidarity. To contribute to this debate, this article proposes a refined concept of ‘multi-level blame attribution’. It postulates that public support for EU-level welfare policies crucially depends on how citizens attribute responsibility for economic outcomes across different levels of agency. Results from an original public opinion survey conducted in 10 European Union member states demonstrate that attributing blame to individuals decreases citizens’ willingness to show solidarity with needy Europeans, whereas attributing blame to the EU increases support. The role of attributing blame to national governments is dependent on the country context; beliefs that worse economic outcomes are caused by national governments’ policy decisions tend to dampen support for EU targeted welfare policies only in the Nordic welfare states. The article concludes by discussing the implications of multi-level blame attribution for the formation of public attitudes towards European solidarity.

ROLE OF WOMEN PARTICIPATION IN PALM OIL PROCESSING IN BENUE STATE, NIGERIA

The study looked at how women in Ogbadigbo local government, Benue State, participated in palm oil processing. The study relied on primary sources. Women's engagement in oil palm processing in Benue State and specifically in Ogbadibo Local Government Area was investigated using a public opinion survey research design. To gather relevant data from respondents in the study region, questionnaires were used. Data was collected from 134 respondents who worked in oil processing of the study area. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, gross margin, multiple regression modeling, and a Likert scale. Oil palm processing had a gross margin of $236135.78, and net processing income of $25367.50 per year. The significance between oil palm processing and palm oil production was tested using a paired sample t-test, which found that it was significant at P≤0.01 with a mean average of 28.10. 62. The results also showed that only 4% of respondents used current methods. Women also complained about insufficient funding and high maintenance costs as important challenges affecting oil palm processors, along with other concerns such as a lack of access to credit, insufficient storage, and a bad road network. Finally, the study advised that significant stages of processes such as fruit digestion and oil extraction be mechanized to relieve female processors of their labor. This will boost the number of women who work in the oil palm industry.

Marketing in a crisis: lessons from the “COVID election” in New Zealand

PurposeThis paper aims to identify both the traditional and novel forms of marketing behind New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern’s landslide victory in the 2020 New Zealand General Election during the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThis research analysed both qualitative and quantitative data, including over 70 primary sources, the perspectives of practitioners, polling and data from surveys with over 450,000 respondents. The qualitative data was analysed interpretively against established theoretical concepts, whereas the quantitative data was analysed through descriptive statistics.FindingsThis research found that COVID-19 drastically changed what the public prioritised, allowing Ardern and Labour to position themselves as guardians of government stability, while camouflaging previous delivery failures. Labour also used a more emergent market-oriented and “polite” populist political marketing strategy.Research limitations/implicationsWhile the survey data used is not a perfect sample of the population, it is the largest public opinion survey in New Zealand and, given its convergence with other sources, provides valuable insights into political marketing during a crisis more broadly.Practical implicationsThis research reinforces marketing’s most important aspect; the market should drive action. How decision makers respond to the market should depend on the environment. Thus, up-to-date market research becomes even more important during a crisis, as the environment changes rapidly. This leaves prior assumptions obsolete and implies strategy needs to be adaptive. Additionally, greater public attention provides governing leaders with the opportunity to present a more well-rounded leadership image.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to look at marketing while in government and election campaigning in the context of successful management of a global pandemic.

Obedient liberals? Mass attitudes in a monarchy enclave

Mass attitudes in a monarchy context are understudied relative to those in advanced and new democracies. By employing the case of a monarchy enclave in Yogyakarta province, Indonesia, this article tries to uncover mass attitudes towards democracy in such a setting. It is based on public opinion surveys conducted by PolGov Universitas Gadjah Mada with 2181 respondents. The study finds a strong existence of obedient liberals, i.e. people who believe in liberal views and embrace values of self-expression but are proud of having a non-democratic political system. While this distinguished attitude revisits Almond and Verba’s allegiant citizens, this article aligns with the revisionists of the civic culture model by arguing that a political regime, i.e. the monarchy enclave, helps pave the way for the presence and persistence of obedient-liberal mass attitudes. This distinct mass attitude in turn explains how the monarchy enclave has survived for decades.

BFS welcomes new public opinion survey supporting water fluoridation in Scotland

BFS welcomes new public opinion survey supporting water fluoridation in Scotland

Reliability and Validity of Widely Used International Surveys on the Environment

Do existing public opinion surveys provide valid and reliable measures of attitudes towards environmental sustainability? This question is critical given the importance of public support for achieving sustainability. Starting with 28 survey items about the environment drawn from the World Values Survey Waves 5 and 6 and the 2010 International Social Survey Program, we assessed reliability by checking for significant correlations between similar or identical items on different surveys. Next, to assess validity, we evaluated correlations between survey items and 22 objective environmental indicators drawn from the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). As the level of economic development is a likely confound, we also performed partial correlation analyses controlling for GDP per capita. From the initial 28 items, we identified 23 sufficiently reliable items, but many of these were found to have low predictive power in the validity analysis. Items about air and water pollution were valid predictors of objective environmental conditions in these areas. Items asking about the relative importance of environmental problems compared to other social issues were also good positive predictors of progress on perceptible environmental issues. Items asking about general sentiment with no clear referent performed poorly. When controlling for GDP, country-level attitudes were more aligned with country-specific environmental conditions. Finally, nearly half of all EPI indicators were associated with few or no survey items, indicating the existence of ‘blind spots’ in public awareness. Our findings should offer guidance to both survey developers and users, as well as to policy makers responsible for conveying information about environmental sustainability to the wider public.

Are Citizens More Politically Engaged when Candidate Selection is Democratic? Analysis of Seven Parliamentary Election Cycles in Israel (1996–2015)

Previous research finds limited evidence for a positive link between intra-party democracy and citizens’ inclination to vote for democratizing parties or to become more involved in partisan activities. This article investigates the association between democratic candidate selection processes and citizens’ political engagement levels, which can be considered a crucial predisposition for actual political participation. First, we test the selection processes’ effect on the two forms of political participation that are likely to be affected by democratizing intra-party reforms: electoral and partisan participation. Second, we examine how inclusive candidate selection processes are linked to three forms of engagement: watching campaign ads, reading newspapers, and discussing politics with friends and family. The analysis is based on public opinion survey data during seven election cycles from the Israel National Election Survey and candidate selection data on Israeli parties. The results of the hierarchical models show that democratic candidate selection processes are associated with higher engagement levels, while simultaneously bearing no effect on electoral and partisan participation. This implies the existence of a structural disconnection between citizens’ political engagement and participation levels in response to intra-party democracy.

Publisher’s note

Gun-related deaths and gun purchases were at record highs in 2020. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, public protests against police violence, and a tense political environment, which may influence policy preferences, we aimed to understand the current state of support for gun policies in the U.S. We fielded a national public opinion survey in January 2019 and January 2021 using an online panel to measure support for 34 gun policies among U.S. adults. We compared support over time, by gun ownership status, and by political party affiliation. Most respondents supported 33 of the 34 gun regulations studied. Support for seven restrictive policies declined from 2019 to 2021, driven by reduced support among non-gun owners. Support declined for three permissive policies: allowing legal gun carriers to bring guns onto college campuses or K-12 schools and stand your ground laws. Public support for gun-related policies decreased from 2019 to 2021, driven by decreased support among Republicans and non-gun owners.

Question evaluation for real-time surveys: Lessons from COVID-19 data collection

The need for high-quality, real-time data has never presented itself as clearly as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic. Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, from both a policy and a public health perspective, required timely, accurate data about the public's attitudes and behaviors from health surveillance, monitoring, and public opinion surveys. The uniqueness of the COVID-19 pandemic also created particular challenges for survey data collection, specifically, how to develop high quality survey questions on topics that had never been previously fielded. To account for this challenge, the National Center for Health Statistics adopted an iterative, two-component, mixed-method approach to question design and evaluation. The first, a cognitive interviewing study using virtual, online interviews was used to produce interpretative schemata of the response processes underlying the survey questions. The second, a two-round, mixed method survey using a statistically-sampled panel, was designed to further develop the interpretive schemata and to allow for detailed subgroup analyses. To increase the usefulness of the survey's second round, cognitive interview findings and results from the survey's first round were used to develop both open- and close-ended embedded probes. Taken together, the studies reveal the specific problems for question-design during such a novel, quickly-evolving event: 1) a lack of shared understanding of novel concepts and vocabulary, 2) the shifting reference period respondents use to think about attitudes and behaviors during a multi-year event, 3) the pervasive nature of the event that therefore frames how respondents conceptualize and process questions about unrelated topics. This iterative approach to understanding question-design problems not only allowed for the continuing improvement of COVID-19 survey items, going forward, it also provided a methodological foundation for question development for high quality, real-time data collection.

BFS welcomes new public opinion survey supporting water fluoridation in Scotland

BFS welcomes new public opinion survey supporting water fluoridation in Scotland

Victim, perpetrator, neither: Attitudes on deservingness and culpability in immigration law

AbstractThis study examines whether there is popular support for a restrictive immigration policy aimed at denying safe haven to human rights abusers and those affiliated with terrorism. We designed a public opinion survey experiment that asks respondents to evaluate whether low level or high-level Taliban members who otherwise qualify for refugee status deserve immigration benefits. We found that a majority of respondents did not immediately deny a visa to low-level worker. Looking at respondents' explanations for their decision, we find two distinct clusters of reasons that we classify as either circumstantial–focused on the particularities of the case–or categorical–focused on general attributes of the applicant. We suggest that domestic and international criminal law logics about acts and intentions, as well as roles and responsibilities, are reflected in beliefs about deservingness in this distinct immigration context, and may support more generous attitudes toward those seeking refugee status. Many respondents using circumstantial reasoning saw a distinction between the jobs potential immigrants have done in their pasts and what they actually believe, underscoring the fraught dynamics of armed conflict in which people may be swept up in violence they do not support.

Division Does Not Imply Predictability: Demographics Continue to Reveal Little About Voting and Partisanship

What are the political consequences of ongoing social sorting? We evaluate the degree of social sorting and mass polarization using the predictability of partisanship and voting decisions as quantities of interest. Contrary to expectations, demographic sorting has not produced a very predictable electorate. Models trained on nothing more than demographic labels from public opinion surveys (1952–2020) predict only 63.9% of two-party vote choices and 63.4% of partisan IDs correctly out-of-sample—whether they be based on logistic regressions or tree-based machine learning models. Moreover, demographics’ predictive power over vote choice or partisan affiliation shows a surprising stability over time. We argue that while select demographics’ marginal effects may appear to be evidence of social sorting, the joint predictability of political behavior using only demographic characteristics has been, and still is, modest at best.

Evaluation of pre-Games effects of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games on Japanese population-level physical activity: a time-series analysis

BackgroundThe Olympic Games represent an opportunity to create a ‘physical activity legacy’ that promotes physical activity at the population level in the host nations and cities. However, previous studies showed little increase in population-level physical activity following the Olympics. The upsurge of public interest in sports and physical activity participation before the Olympics may diminish rapidly following the Games. We examined the pre-Games effects of the Olympics on Japanese population-level physical activity after the announcement of Tokyo’s successful bid for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in September 2013.MethodsWe used publicly available data from serial cross-sectional surveys conducted with nationally or regionally representative samples in Japan seven years before and after the announcement (from 2006–2020). The outcomes were 1) daily step counts and 2) exercise habit prevalence (≥ 30 min/day, ≥ 2 days/week, and over a year) from the National Health and Nutrition Surveys Japan (NHNS-J; 14 time points; aggregated data); and 3) sports participation (at least once a week) from the National Sports-Life Survey conducted every two years (NSLS; eight time points; individual-level data of 18,867 adults) and from the Public Opinion Survey on Sports Participation of Tokyo Residents (POSSP; eight time points; aggregated data). Age- and gender-adjusted regression models were used to estimate changes in the outcomes before and after the announcement.ResultsThere were no significant pre-Games effects of the Olympics on national-level physical activity participation among Japanese adults. Sports participation (56.4% and 57.5%, respectively; P = 0.518), daily steps (6,535 and 6,686 steps/day; P = 0.353), and exercise habit (30.7% and 29.1%, P = 0.309) did not change significantly before and after the announcement. Although an increase in sports participation among Tokyo residents was not found in the NSLS (61.5% and 59.3%, P = 0.227), it was observed in the POSSP (49.1% and 57.7%, P = 0.019). Nonetheless, this increase might not be related to the pre-Games effects since the trend diminished following the announcement.ConclusionsPopulation-level physical activity did not show significant changes until 2020. Realising the physical activity legacy of an Olympics may require strategic promotion and cross-agency partnership implementation in the pre- and post-event period.

Citizen response to local service provision: Emerging democratic accountability in decentralized West Africa?

A central tenet of democratic theory is that the threat of electoral sanction holds politicians accountable to citizen preferences. But do voters who receive social service investments evaluate the state more positively and does this translate into electoral rewards for incumbents? I examine this question in decentralized Senegal, where locally elected governments are responsible for providing basic social services. Pairing village-level data on local service delivery with local electoral results and public opinion surveys, I present evidence that receiving new public goods investments does improve citizen evaluations of their local governments, but that voters are more likely to reward incumbent mayors than they are incumbent parties. I argue that this is a rational strategy for voters in new democracies with weak party institutionalization and suggests that party systems are an important scope condition for how voters try to hold their governments accountable in emerging democracies.

APA Pleased Over Recent Legislative Wins but Must Keep Pushing

APA Pleased Over Recent Legislative Wins but Must Keep Pushing

Integrating Multiclass Light Weighted BiLSTM Model for Classifying Negative Emotions.

With the continuous development of social networks, Weibo has become an essential platform for people to share their opinions and feelings in daily life. Analysis of users' emotional tendencies can be effectively applied to public opinion control, public opinion surveys, and product recommendations. However, the traditional deep learning algorithm often needs a large amount of data to be retained to obtain a better accuracy when faced with new work tasks. Given this situation, a multiclassification method of microblog negative sentiment based on MAML (model-agnostic metalearning) and BiLSTM (bidirectional extended short-term memory network) is proposed to represent the microblog text word vectorization and the combination of MAML and BiLSTM is constructed. The model of BiLSTM realizes the classification of negative emotions on Weibo and updates the parameters through machine gradient descent; the metalearner in MAML calculates the sum of the losses of multiple pieces of training, performs a second gradient descent, and updates the metalearner parameters. The updated metalearner can quickly iterate when faced with a new Weibo negative sentiment classification task. The experimental results show that compared with the prepopular model, on the Weibo negative sentiment dataset, the precision rate, recall rate, and F1 value are increased by 1.68 percentage points, 2.86 percentage points, and 2.27 percentage points, respectively.

Local support for the US–Mexico border wall and local immigration policy

ABSTRACT A signature policy of former US President Donald Trump was his plan to halt unauthorized migration from Mexico by building a wall the length of the US–Mexico border. While the existing research has identified several political, demographic and spatial correlates of individual-level support for (or opposition to) the wall, existing research has yet to provide local-level estimates of aggregate support for a border wall and an account of its spatial distribution. Using multilevel regression and synthetic poststratification (MrsP) and data from large-scale public opinion surveys conducted between 2016 and 2022, this article presents county-level estimates for support for the US–Mexico border wall. The results demonstrate that while a majority of the American public opposes the construction of the wall, there is substantial variation in county-level support. Support for the wall is highest in areas where Trump received strong support in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Support is also linked to proximity to the US–Mexico border and racial–ethnic composition at the county level in complex ways. It is similarly linked to county-level cooperation (or lack thereof) with federal immigration enforcement, pointing to an opinion–policy link at the local level.

The Problem of Otherness: Poland’s Immigration Policy and the Virtues of Parochialism

Over the past decade, immigration has been the main driver shaping Poland’s migration policy. This has given rise to the concept and problem of an immigrant as an “other” who should be adjusted to Polish reality. The idea of parochialism is helpful in addressing the matter of the lookingglass self and its consequences for immigration policy. This article aims to interpret Poland’s immigration policy in the context of parochialism and its virtues. It points to the consequences of a migration paradigm shift generated by modernisation and indigenisation. The methodology embraces a theoretical framing of parochialism, an interpretive political analysis approach, a qualitative content analysis, and an interpretation of selected public opinion polls and surveys. The argument developed in this article holds that Poland’s immigration policy after 2015 has been marked by the tendency to favour parochialism as an attitude which captures immigrants in the exclusionary formula of “others”. The mobilisation of the Polish population to oppose the inflow of immigrants is in line with their “domestication” according to ethno-nationalist standards. Such process facilitates the implementation of Poland’s immigration policy by shifting responsibility from the central authorities to local communities.

Assessing the relative accuracy of gridded population sampling: results from an election survey experiment

ABSTRACT International survey researchers are increasingly turning to a geospatial sampling approach known as gridded population sampling for finer resolution and a more updated sampling frame than conventional census-based sampling. To date, there have been no direct comparisons of accuracy between survey results derived from the two methods. This experiment fielded two parallel public opinion surveys concurrently before Uruguay’s 2019 first-round election to compare the accuracy of both probabilistic sampling approaches. Holding other factors constant, we found that the gridded population sample survey performed slightly better than the conventionally drawn census sample survey at predicting election results. The quality of the Uruguayan census frame set a high standard for the gridded population sample, and our experimental results demonstrate that it surpassed it. Given gridded population sampling’s additional demonstrated advantages, particularly time savings, these results suggest that it is a promising approach for face-to-face survey sampling in many lower- and middle-income countries.

Developing core national indicators of public attitudes towards the police in Canada

ABSTRACT Police departments regularly conduct public opinion surveys to measure attitudes towards the police. The results of these surveys can be used to shape and evaluate policing policy and practice. Yet the extant evidence base is hampered when people use different methods and when there is no common data standard. In this paper we present a set of 13 core national indicators that can be used by police services across Canada to ensure measurement quality and draw proper comparisons between regions and over time. Having identified a set of 50 survey questions through an expert consultation process, we field those items on a quota sample of 2527 Canadians. Our analysis of the survey data has three stages. First, we use confirmatory factor analysis to assess scale properties. Second, we use substitution analysis to identify 13 single indicators that ‘best stand in’ for each scale. Third, we use the set of 50 and the sub-set of 13 measures to test procedural justice theory for the first time in the Canadian context. Overall, those commissioning and managing public attitudes surveys can use the 13 core indicators as a conceptually-rich and empirically-validated tool through which to understand local survey data in the context of other municipal, provincial, territorial and national contexts.