Straw Poll Research Articles

Political Gold: The Australian Sports Grants Scandal

The partisan allocation of public funds has a long history in Australian politics. Using a unique dataset, which allows us to distinguish the merit-based component of the funding decision from the politically based component, we examine the 2018–2019 Australian sports grants scandal. We find that local funding allocations for sports infrastructure were directed disproportionately to win marginal electorates and to reward loyal supporters. However, contrary to our expectations, we find virtually no electoral impact of the grants: those electorates that received more sporting grant funding were no more likely to swing in favour of the government in the 2019 election than electorates that received no funding. A straw poll of members of the House of Representatives suggests one possible explanation as to why pork-barrelling persists: parliamentarians tend to overestimate its electoral impact.

On the history of researching electoral sociology

In our modern world electoral sociology, which is under constant scrutiny by the general public, as well as members of the media, in many ways shapes the image of sociology as a scientific discipline. Today sociology is often represented by media reports about the results of public opinion polls on the subject of politics and electoral affairs. Meanwhile a certain other trend is apparent: the high expectations imposed on electoral studies, as well as on their verifiability and efficiency, encourage the further development of sociological research and sociology in general. Scientific studies on electoral processes are defined by the convergence of various schools and paradigms of research, which implies an overlapping of different approaches and methods. This article presents the stages of electoral sociology’s development, from “straw polls” to contemporary theories of electoral behavior (the straw poll stage, electoral sociology in the 1930’s and 1940’s, ecological analysis in electoral sociology, the behavioral approach, the sociological theory on electoral behavior, the socio-psychological theory of electoral behavior, the theory of instrumental rationality), which in modern electoral sociology are known as “post-Gallup” theories. The author reveals the main characteristics of each stage of modern electoral sociology’s development, while highlighting its achievements and value, and giving a comprehensive analysis of modern theories of electoral behavior, with regards to issues located on the line between political sociology and sociology of law. Among these issues special consideration is given to elections as a political phenomenon, the political culture and political attitudes of the electorate, features of voting systems, political mechanisms and electoral technologies.

THE RHETORICAL USE OF RANDOM SAMPLING: CRAFTING AND COMMUNICATING THE PUBLIC IMAGE OF POLLS AS A SCIENCE (1935-1948).

The scientific pollsters (Archibald Crossley, George H. Gallup, and Elmo Roper) emerged onto the American news media scene in 1935. Much of what they did in the following years (1935-1948) was to promote both the political and scientific legitimacy of their enterprise. They sought to be recognized as the sole legitimate producers of public opinion. In this essay I examine the, mostly overlooked, rhetorical work deployed by the pollsters to publicize the scientific credentials of their polling activities, and the central role the concept of sampling has had in that pursuit. First, they distanced themselves from the failed straw poll by claiming that their sampling methodology based on quotas was informed by science. Second, although in practice they did not use random sampling, they relied on it rhetorically to derive the symbolic benefits of being associated with the "laws of probability."

Looks That Matter

Research demonstrates that good looks matter in politics. The global trend today is toward more visual ballots, which include candidates’ photographs. Because voters are exposed to a candidate’s appearance right before they vote, physical attractiveness may be a significant contributor to electoral success. But does appearance matter equally in high-information elections, where all candidates are well known to voters, and low-information elections, where voters have little or no knowledge of who the candidates are? How does enhancing the photos of candidates through software programs affect their electability? To our knowledge, this article is the first to examine the impact of candidates’ appearance in high- and low-information elections in the field using two experiments involving the manipulation of their appearance. Data for the first study were collected in a low-information election in which a student population was asked to select from a list of fictitious candidates for city council. In this study, we found that the candidates’ looks had an impact on the votes they received. Data for the second study were collected right before a high-information election: A straw poll that took place immediately before the primaries for a major political party in Israel, involving party members selecting from a list of real candidates. Here the candidates’ appearance had no impact on the votes they received, even for the lesser known candidates on the list. The results indicate that the impact of visual manipulation of candidate images does influence voters, but is limited by the informational context of the elections.

Community Detection in Political Discussions on Twitter

In November 9, 2014, the Catalan government called Catalan people to participate in a straw poll about the independence of Catalonia from Spain. This article analyzes the use of Twitter between November 8 and 10, 2014. Drawing on a methodology developed by Guerrero-Solé, Corominas-Murtra, and Lopez-Gonzalez, this work examines the structure of the retweet overlap network (RON), formed by those users whose communities of retweeters have nonzero overlapping, to detect the community structure of the network. The results show a high polarization of the resulting network and prove that the RON is a reliable method to determinate network community structures and users’ political leaning in political discussions.

‘Mind maps’: helping from pedagogy to packing

A straw poll at the recent Royal Society of Medicine Winter Meeting in Saalbach, Austria, showed that only a handful of delegates were aware of ‘mind maps’ – surprising given that an internet search will find millions of mind map images and articles. In this article the author describes the basic concept of mind maps and how they can be used by healthcare professionals in their work.

On Two-Period Committee Voting: Why Straw Polls Should Have Consequences.

We consider a committee voting setup with two rounds of voting where committee members who possess private information about the state of the world have to make a binary decision. We investigate incentives for truthful revelation of their information in the first voting period. Coughlan (2000) shows that members reveal their information in a straw poll only if their preferences are in fact homogeneous. By taking costs of time into account, we demonstrate that committees have strictly higher incentives to reveal information if a decision with high levels of consensus can already be made in the straw poll. In such scenarios, members of all homogeneous and some heterogeneous juries are strictly better off when the requirement for early decisions is chosen carefully.

Media Management in a Small Polity: Political Elites’ Synchronized Calls to Regional Talk Radio and Attempted Manipulation of Public Opinion Polls

Little is known about how elected representatives attempt to manipulate public opinion and news media through their participation on regional open line radio or media straw polls. This article examines the systematic attempts by political actors to engage these media in the small polity of Newfoundland, Canada, where politics is characterized by the hyper-local nature of 590-VOCM radio programming. Our mixed-method study draws from talk radio call-in logs, online straw poll vote results, observation of the production of open line programming, and insights from local media personnel. We draw attention to two clandestine media management techniques. First, we analyze call-ins by elected legislators to talk radio that were timed to coincide with the known field dates of a public opinion polling company. Second, we report that handheld communication devices were used by senior members of the governing party to mobilize legislators and party personnel to repeatedly vote on straw polls on regional media Web sites. Our findings show that there is a substantial and statistically significant increase in the probability that legislators will call talk radio when pollsters are in the field. Furthermore, we document and explore the manner in which political elites mobilize to engage online media straw polls, and discover that straw poll questions which address political topics attract a disproportionately higher number of “votes” than nonpolitical questions. This micro-level study offers perspective for interpreting macro-level knowledge about political talk radio, horse race/game and strategic media frames, and about political elites’ mobilization and media management tactics.

High-Stakes Evaluation: Five Years Later

This article compares the International Nursing Association of Clinical Simulation and Learning (INACSL) memberships' thoughts and discussions about the use of simulation for high- stakes evaluation in nursing education to a similar town hall discussion, five years ago. Data on the topic of high-stakes testing were collected through a survey before the INACSL conference in June 2014. During a town hall meeting at the conference, the survey data was presented, attendees shared their thoughts and reacted to prepared comments by selected simulation leaders. Half of the town hall attendees favored high stakes testing before the survey findings and discussion. This number dropped to a third of the attendees by the end of the town hall meeting, by straw poll. The survey findings, a summary of the town hall discussion and final thoughts from simulation leaders are shared in this article.

Politics and Pleasure at the Iowa Straw Poll: A Participant Observation

Politics and Pleasure at the Iowa Straw Poll: A Participant Observation

On board the referendum tram

On the eve of the Independence referendum we hitch an imaginary ride on one of Scotland's engineering novelties - a Spanish-built Edinburgh tram - and take our own straw poll of what the passengers think.

Straw Poll Journalism and Quantitative Data

In 1936, The Literary Digest poll made a disastrous forecast: President Roosevelt would lose the election. George H. Gallup, one of the founding fathers of modern polling, believed the magazine could have avoided this outcome. The only thing the Digest had to do, he said, was to perform a “simple statistical correction” on the data. But Gallup was speaking from the point of view of an occupational creed foreign to the journalistic standards that informed the straw poll journalism practiced by The Literary Digest and other news publications in those days. This paper argues that new journalistic norms (e.g. “impartiality”) were the principal obstacle in the dissemination to the sphere of straw poll journalism of an emerging statistical technology, whose purpose was to evaluate and correct the raw data obtained by polls. The research shows that news-workers of that era did not view “statistical correction” as a legitimate journalistic practice. As a result, polling became, for many years thereafter, the specialty of experts outside the field of journalism.

End the farce; a new approach to authorship

Authors and peer reviewers are the engine room of any scientific journal; rarely paid and inadequately acknowledged background stars except in the case of spectacular success or equally spectacular misconduct. Authors see their cherished articles disappear into the black box of a journal's peer review system, awaiting an outcome that is usually unpredictable and generally unsatisfactory. In return, journals impose a tyrannical regime upon authors. Constructive comments are rare; words of encouragement even rarer. Publication is offered with tortuous and labour-intensive caveats; rejection delivered with standard words devoid of sympathy. All this assumes, of course, that you qualify as an author. The tyranny of journals extends to ascribing authorship. Is it enough to have a genius idea that others research and translate into understandable prose? Is it enough to collect the data for a research study and leave the ideas and interpretation to others? What about writing or revising the article itself, is that sufficient to merit co-authorship? In the self-referential world of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (IJCMJE), only a substantial contribution to each stage of an article's life cycle from conception and data collection, though drafting, to final approval qualifies you as an author.1 Where the cartel of the ICMJE leads, everybody else tends to follow. Yet the authorship guidelines proposed by the ICMJE are unworkable. Last year, I ran a workshop on authorship issues at a prolific research institution. Most people in the audience of around forty people had authored medical journal articles, the majority of them several times over. I asked if any of them had ever met the authorship criteria of ICMJE, the guidance that all medical journals defer to. Only two people raised their hands. Indeed, the problems with the ICMJE authorship guidance have been confirmed again and again by empirical research and by anecdotal evidence. Part of the problem is academia, which seeks an easy option, just as it does with impact factors, to measure academic output. But should the difficulties faced by academia in distinguishing the work rate of its employees become a burden for scientific journals? An important role of journals is to promote transparency, which is why several journals have now adopted a system of contributorship that records precisely the work of everybody involved with a manuscript. In addition, a guarantor system indentifies an individual who will take public responsibility for the integrity of the work.2 When authorship disputes occur, journals are usually left to resolve a contentious argument; a role that most journals are undertrained and under-resourced to attempt. Guidance offered by Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) helps, but editors and publishers are left to liaise with employers and academic institutions, usually unsatisfactorily. Many authorship disagreements arise because of the ICMJE guidance. What value, then, in authorship policies that create problems rather than solve them? To my mind, the current ICMJE guidance is a farce and, if my straw poll is any measure, the guidance is flouted routinely. Most authors of articles do not meet the ICMJE guidance, and the majority of journal articles could be deemed fraudulent on that basis. A better solution would be to open up authorship. Instead of insisting on each author's involvement on every aspect of writing up a research study, why not include as an author each person who has contributed to any — instead of all — of the items listed by the ICMJE? Next, each author's role would need to be clearly stated in a contributorship statement. Finally, and importantly, each author would need to be willing to take public responsibility for the integrity of the research and the article. This might seem a radical change, but it is a logical one — and it is one JRSM is seeking to introduce. Your views are welcome. Authorship is currently a sham; it needs to become an honest statement of credit.

A Computed Tomography (CT) wish list, from a medical physicist’s perspective

Significant advances in computed tomography (CT) technology have been made since the first clinical images were published in 1973. The initial clinical applications were brain scans where the patient’s head was immobilised by a water bag that compensated for the large changes in flux adjacent to the head. Body imaging became feasible as improvements led to better image quality and reduced scan times. Improved computing technology has allowed for image reconstruction, including rendering and 3D reconstruction, to all occur in real time. Perfusion studies, cardiac imaging and CT angiography are now common and interventional procedures can be performed using CT fluoroscopy guidance. Some of the major scanner developments that have contributed to this progress are slip-ring technology, which facilitated helical scanning, and multidetector CT systems with capabilities for volume scanning. In addition, increasingly complex X-ray tube designs and novel CT detector materials and configurations have also contributed to changes in CT imaging. Dose reporting began to address concerns raised regarding the risks from radiation exposure and other practical dose reduction measures such as the adaptation of parameters to the patient size were implemented. This included modulating the tube current throughout the scan. More recent CT developments include dual-energy imaging and iterative reconstruction techniques, which are used instead of or in combination with traditional filtered back-projection image formation. All of these improvements in technologies combined have resulted in dose reductions for some CT procedures in the order of 90 %! The changes to image quality, dose and the way in which CT scans are performed have been extensive. However, there are always further enhancements that can be made, especially as user requirements or objectives change. For diagnostic medical physicists, there will always be a wish list of what we would like on a CT scanner. This is largely driven by the work that we undertake and the needs of our colleagues, who request, perform or interpret CT scans. Inevitably, achieving the best health outcome for the patient is the primary concern. The wish list is also influenced by current opinions and attitudes towards CT imaging. Hence, the desirable features for a CT scanner are discussed below, with the rationale for these first explored. A small straw poll of radiologists and radiographers from a variety of workplaces was also undertaken to gauge opinions. Z. Brady (&) Radiology Department, The Alfred, P.O. Box 315, Prahran, VIC 3181, Australia e-mail: z.brady@alfred.org.au

The Battle for China's Top Nine Leadership Posts

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For example, Alice Miller, “The Politburo Standing Committee under Hu Jintao,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 35, September 21, 2011, p. 5, http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/CLM35AM.pdf. 2. Li Bin, Wu Jing, and Tan Jingjing, “Nine Members of the Politburo Standing Committee attended the National Day Celebration,” YNET.com, September 30, 2011, http://bjyouth.ynet.com/3.1/1110/01/6309804.html; also see Wang Jianmin, “Nine Members of the Politburo Standing Committee Watched the Launch of China's Space Station,” china.com, September 30, 2011, http://news.china.com/focus/tgyh/11106738/20110930/16794768.html. 3. Xinhua News Net, October 15, 2011, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2007‐10‐15/113314089759.shtml. 4. These nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee often concurrently occupy the most important government positions such as president of the PRC, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC), and premier of the State Council. 5. For more discussion of Bo's distinct political drive, see Cheng Li, “China's Midterm Jockeying: Gearing Up for 2012 (Part 1: Provincial Chiefs),” China Leadership Monitor, no. 31, February 15, 2010, p. 22, http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/CLM31CL.pdf; and Dexter Roberts, “China's Sentimental Journey Back to Mao,” Bloomberg Businessweek, January 13, 2011, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_04/b4212012787534.htm. 6. “Not Fade Away: A Growing Number of Former Leaders are Speaking Out,” The Economist, September 17, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21529108; and Kent Ewing, “False nostalgia for Zhu Rongji,” Asia Times Online, September 20, 2011, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MI20Df01.html. 7. For the straw poll, see Alice Miller, “The Case of Xi Jinping and the Mysterious Succession,” China Leadership Monitor, no. 30, November 19, 2009, pp. 8–9, http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/CLM30AM.pdf. 8. For further discussion of the origin of this practice, see Cheng Li, “The New Bipartisanship within the Chinese Communist Party,” Orbis 49, no. 3 (Summer 2005): pp. 387–400. 9. Cheng Li, “China's Communist Party‐State: The Structure and Dynamics of Power,” in Politics in China, ed. William A. Joseph (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 165–191. 10. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, How China's Leaders Think (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte. Ltd., 2010), p. 230. 11. For example, Li Jingrui, “China's Prominent Provincial Leaders Outline their Blueprints for Governance,” Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan (China Newsweek), July 26, 2011, http://www.chinanews.com/gn/2011/07‐26/3210364.shtml. Additional informationNotes on contributorsCheng LiCheng Li is director of research and senior fellow of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. The author is grateful to Eve Cary, Paul Cavey, and Jordan Lee for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article

“President” Landon and the 1936Literary DigestPoll

The disastrous prediction of an Alf Landon victory in the 1936 presidential election by the Literary Digest poll is a landmark event in the history of American survey research in general and polling in particular. It marks both the demise of the straw poll, of which the Digest was the most conspicuous and well-regarded example, and the rise to prominence of the self-proclaimed “scientific” poll. Why did the Digest poll fail so miserably? One view has come to prevail over the years: because the Digest selected its sample primarily from telephone books and car registration lists and since these contained, at the time, mostly well-to-do folks who would vote Republican, it is no wonder the magazine mistakenly predicted a Republican win. This “conventional explanation” has found its way into countless publications (scholarly and in the press) and college courses. It has been used to illustrate the disastrous effects of a poorly designed poll. But is it correct? Empirical evidence, in the form of a 1937 Gallup poll, shows that this “conventional explanation” is wrong, because voters with telephones and cars backed Franklin D. Roosevelt and because it was those who failed to participate in the poll (overwhelmingly supporters of Roosevelt) who were mainly responsible for the faulty prediction.

The Evolution of Election Polling in the United States

Public opinion polls have long played an important role in the study and conduct of elections. In this essay, I outline the evolution of poll- ing as used for three different functions in U.S. presidential elections: fore- casting election outcomes, understanding voter behavior, and planning campaign strategy. Since the introduction of scientific polling in the 1936 election, technology has altered the way polls are used by the media, public, candidates, and scholars. Today, polls and surveys remain vital to electoral behavior and our understanding of it, but they are being increas- ingly supplemented or replaced by alternate measures and methods. Public opinion polls are now conducted on every topic under the sun—everything from presidential approval to celebrity outfits and sports predictions—but they remain especially fundamental to the conduct and study of elections. Elections and polling are so intertwined that it is hard to imagine one without the other. Poll numbers provide fodder for media coverage and election predictions, they shape candidate and voter behavior, and they are the basis of interpreting the meaning of election outcomes. Public Opinion Quarterly was founded in January 1937 on the heels of the advent of modern scientific polling in U.S. presidential elections. The first issue included an essay, ''Straw Polls in 1936,'' explaining how George Gallups quota-controlled survey of a few thousand triumphed over the Literary Digests straw poll of millions in correctly predicting the election outcome (Crossley 1937). Election polling has evolved considerably since that inaugural issue. Perhaps most notably, there has been an explosion in the number of election polls in the United States. Traugott (2005) estimated a 900-percent increase in trial heat polls between 1984 and 2000. The number has continued to grow since then, due largely to the rise in interactive-voice-response (IVR) and Internet polls since the 2000 election. In the 2008 election, there were an estimated 975

The Baron's complaint

The Baron's complaint

Fentanyl-induced cough

I was intrigued to see Hung et al.’s [1] paper on preventing fentanyl-induced cough, having only last month read Ambesh et al.’s [2] report on the same topic. At the risk of appalling the rest of the specialty, I have to admit I had not even realised that fentanyl caused cough and I find the incidence quoted (18–65%) astonishing; I doubt it reflects most anaesthetists’ experience. My own practice (and I do not suppose it is unique) in most routine adult cases is to give 100 μg fentanyl with 30 mg propofol (containing 0.1% lidocaine) and then pre-oxygenate. When it becomes apparent that this is having an effect (typically after 30 s or so), I proceed with induction; I don’t recall anyone ever coughing at this time. This technique was prompted by Anderson and Robb’s [3] paper that showed that using propofol as its own co-induction agent seemed to be as effective as using midazolam, which I adopted in response to nursing complaints that my day-surgery cases were excessively sleepy post-operatively, an outcome I ascribed to the midazolam and which duly resolved with this change. The rationale of this technique is to reduce the total dose of propofol required, in order to minimise the resulting haemodynamic disturbance. However it may also be that propofol fortuitously reduces fentanyl-induced coughing, a possibility suggested by Chin et al.’s [4] prospective, randomised study that suggested ephedrine or lidocaine were efficacious in so doing but failed to reach statistical significance for propofol. It is scientifically plausible that propofol would tend to do this, so perhaps the combination of propofol and lidocaine is even better. I remain perplexed that researchers see so much of this problem, and wondered whether it was simply that they were using a higher dose of fentanyl compared to mine, but several of the papers these groups cite [5–8] used no more than 2 μg.kg−1 and still reported similar incidences. A straw poll of a few colleagues found most of them in agreement with me, that this is a theoretical problem only, with an exception perhaps being in children. It is interesting that the only two serious cases reported [9, 10] were both paediatric cases, both of whom incidentally had doses of no more than 2 μg.kg−1, both of whom had significant co-morbidity, and both of whom could easily have had other reasons for their complications, i.e. there is no proven case in the literature of this phenomenon's causing a serious outcome in adults. In summary, in adults at least, standard doses of fentanyl do not cause a problem in the real world and I believe that devoting much more research effort to solving this ‘problem’ stands to achieve little.

Lead Users and Early Adopters on the Web: The Role of New Technology Product Blogs*

Lead users and early adopters are often blogging or reading and commenting on blogs. Blogs, which are characterized by postings, links, and readers' comments, create a virtual “community” of blogger and readers. Members self-select, and then the community gels around a theme or idea, product, industry, hobby, or any other subject. While community creation is one chief function of blogs, the information-sharing, entertainment, or self- or value-expressive functions are also important. Thus, new product development (NPD) managers can glean a great deal of information about what these audiences are thinking. The significance of blogging to NPD managers also lies in the shift of focus from being separate from to being immersed in these communities. Immersion enhances the potential of close relationships, sharing experiences, and co-creating value with blogging communities through innovation. The focus of the study is on the roles of blogs in new product development, and an exploratory content analysis of new technology product blog postings is described. The goal was to examine what blogs actually say (and don't say) and to classify content based on the core elements of the marketing mix: product (including attributes and service aspects); price (including price comparisons); channel; and promotion. The bulk of the content was in the product category: for example, features (mentioned by 87.14%); overall evaluations (52.86%); performance (28.57%); compatibility (27.14%); ease of use (20%); and style (17.14%). About half discussed price, and about half discussed some channel aspect. The content is analyzed in detail, and implications for NPD mangers are discussed. People voluntarily join new product blogging communities, and if the manager of that product is not “present” (at least as an observer of this “straw poll”) an entire new product marketing agenda can be set by the community. Implicitly or explicitly, blogs can position the value proposition of the product in a prime target audience's mind. Such positioning could be advantageous or catastrophic as far as the NPD manager is concerned.