PolDem09

=Political Polling =

"How can we ever make such an incredulous claim that we have a government by the people, when there are 300 million people in the country? A government by the people, in this sense, isn't even government at all, but is instead complete and total anarchy..." -AA


 * //Basic concepts of polling//**


 * Most poll agencies attempt to get a result that captures a 3% margin of error with 95% confidence.
 * This means that if the method of polling were reproduced many, many times, with different random samples of the same size, the interval given by this method would contain a point estimate +/- 3%, and the true population proportion of people agreeing with a statement would lie in this interval 95% of the time.
 * Random Sampling is a key for these polls to be accurate.
 * Some agencies, such as Rasmussen and CNN tend to be more biased and the randomness of their surveys are debatable, and thus these agencies often give more biased results.
 * Gallup is generally the most reliable of all the political polling agencies.
 * Nonresponse damages the reputability of polls
 * Since random sampling is essential to the reliability of the poll, allowing people to respond at their own choice makes the sample less random, and damages the respectability to the polls. Some of the best polling agencies will contact the person chosen to take the survey multiple times to inform them of the importance of responding, before even administering a survey.
 * Random Sampling is unnecessary if the entire population is reachable
 * Since, for all intents and purposes, this is unfeasible in a country as large as the United States, we generally take random samples of the citizenry.
 * Loaded questions will change the outcomes and damage the reputability of polls
 * For example, "Do you support America's constitutional right to bear arms?" and "Do you think all people should be able to obtain guns, even though many will use them for wrongdoing?" address the same issue, but will elicit much different responses from the masses.

Role of Political Poles

 * could capture the opinion of millions by interviewing as few as 1,500
 * could help determine where the focus of a campaign should be
 * could influence voters or influence citizens to align with a politician

Most citizens appear to only know a limited amount about the government and its workings, but are good at using that limited information to figure out policies, parties, or candidates.

Polls should not be relied upon.

 * 1) opinion saliency- care about certain issues more than others
 * 2) opinion stability- on some issues citizens are steady and others are volatile
 * 3) opinion-policy congruency- some issues government seems largely in sync with popular views, while on others the government seems out of sync
 * 4) Some individuals may lie.

Polls are considered to be fairly accurate in the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, the should not be relied upon (as mentioned above). The data must be collected at random, excluding the possibility of fraud and other mistakes. Since 1952, polls have actually picked the presidential winner by use of exit polls (interviews conducted on Election Day randomly). Wording can greatly influence an individuals stance on an issue. In order to obtain accurate results, the wording must be easily read and not biased in any way. The questions should not direct those taking the polls in one direction or another or showing what answer is "correct" or what answer is "incorrect."