An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals. A person who conducts polls is referred to as a pollster.
Philip Ernest Converse was an American political scientist. He was a professor in political science and sociology at the University of Michigan who conducted research on public opinion, survey research, and quantitative social science.
A straw poll, straw vote, or straw ballot is an ad hoc or unofficial vote. It is used to show the popular opinion on a certain matter, and can be used to help politicians know the majority opinion and help them decide what to say in order to gain votes.
The American Voter, published in 1960, is a seminal study of voting behavior in the United States, authored by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, colleagues at the University of Michigan. Among its controversial conclusions, based on one of the first comprehensive studies of election survey data, is that most voters cast their ballots primarily on the basis of partisan identification, and that independent voters are actually the least involved in and attentive to politics. This theory of voter choice became known as the Michigan Model. It was later extended to the United Kingdom by David Butler and Donald Stokes in Political change in Britain.
An independent voter, often also called an unaffiliated voter or non-affiliated voter in the United States, is a voter who does not align themselves with a political party. An independent is variously defined as a voter who votes for candidates on issues rather than on the basis of a political ideology or partisanship; a voter who does not have long-standing loyalty to, or identification with, a political party; a voter who does not usually vote for the same political party from election to election; or a voter who self-describes as an independent.
Party identification refers to the political party with which an individual identifies. Party identification is affiliation with a political party. Party identification is typically determined by the political party that an individual most commonly supports.
Arthur Lupia is an American political scientist. He is the Gerald R. Ford University Professor at the University of Michigan and Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation. Prior to joining NSF, he was Chairperson of the Board of the Center for Open Science and Chair of National Research Council's Roundtable on the Application of Behavioral and Social Science. His research concerns how information and institutions affect policy and politics, with a focus on how people make decisions when they lack information. He draws from multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines and uses multiple research methods. His topics of expertise include information processing, persuasion, strategic communication, and civic competence.
The Michigan model is a theory of voter choice, based primarily on sociological and party identification factors. Originally proposed by political scientists, beginning with an investigation of the 1952 Presidential election, at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Centre. These scholars developed and refined an approach to voting behaviour in terms of a voter's psychological attachment to a political party, acknowledging cleavages on a group level, which would be continued over the next two decades.
In the United States, many jurisdictions have enacted voter identification laws, which require a person to provide some form of official identification before they are permitted to register to vote, receive a ballot for an election, or to actually vote in elections.
Jon Alexander Krosnick is a professor of Political Science, Communication, and Psychology, and director of the Political Psychology Research Group (PPRG) at Stanford University. Additionally, he is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences and an affiliate of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Krosnick has served as a consultant for government agencies, universities, and businesses, has testified as an expert in court proceedings, and has been an on-air television commentator on election night.
Voting behavior is a form of electoral behavior. Understanding voters' behavior can explain how and why decisions were made either by public decision-makers, which has been a central concern for political scientists, or by the electorate. To interpret voting behavior both political science and psychology expertise were necessary and therefore the field of political psychology emerged including electoral psychology. Political psychology researchers study ways in which affective influence may help voters make more informed voting choices, with some proposing that affect may explain how the electorate makes informed political choices in spite of low overall levels of political attentiveness and sophistication. Conversely, Bruter and Harrison suggest that electoral psychology encompasses the ways in which personality, memory, emotions, and other psychological factors affect citizens' electoral experience and behavior.
Gerrymandering in the United States has been used to increase the power of a political party. Gerrymandering is the practice of setting boundaries of electoral districts to favor specific political interests within legislative bodies, often resulting in districts with convoluted, winding boundaries rather than compact areas. The term "gerrymandering" was coined after a review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry noted that one of the districts looked like a salamander.
Matthew Alejandro Barreto is a political scientist. and co-founder of the national polling and research firm Barreto Segura Partners Research.
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative research project among national election studies around the world. Participating countries and polities include a common module of survey questions in their national post-election studies. The resulting data are collated together along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables into one dataset allowing comparative analysis of voting behavior from a multilevel perspective.
Brian Frederick Schaffner is a political scientist. He is the Newhouse Professor of Civic studies at Tufts University and a faculty associate at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He is also the founding director of the UMass Poll and a co-principal investigator for the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a survey of about 50,000 U.S. voters. He has criticized President Donald Trump for citing a 2014 study based on data from the CCES as proof that voter fraud is widespread in the United States. Of this study, Schaffner told CNN that "Of the people who we were sure were non-citizens, we could not find any who actually cast a vote." He has also said that the authors of the study Trump cited, Jesse Richman and David Earnest, used inaccurate methodology to conclude that millions of non-citizens voted in U.S. elections. He told MassLive.com in January 2017 that "I have been very vocal in speaking out about the study, especially because I feel a sense of responsibility".
A feeling thermometer, also known as a thermometer scale, is a type of visual analog scale that allows respondents to rank their views of a given subject on a scale from "cold" to "hot", analogous to the temperature scale of a real thermometer. It is often used in survey and political science research to measure how positively individuals feel about a given group, individual, issue, or organisation, as well as in quality of life research to measure individuals' subjective health status. It typically uses a rating scale with options ranging from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 100. Questions using the feeling thermometer have been included in every year of the American National Election Studies since 1968.
Political cognition refers to the study of how individuals come to understand the political world, and how this understanding leads to political behavior. Some of the processes studied under the umbrella of political cognition include attention, interpretation, judgment, and memory. Most of the advancements in the area have been made by scholars in the fields of social psychology, political science, and communication studies.
Neil Malhotra is an American political economist. He is the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he is also the Louise and Claude N. Rosenbrg, Jr. Director of the Center for Social Innovation. He studies the politics of the United States, survey methodology, and voter behavior in elections, including work on retrospective voting and on the politics of disaster preparedness and relief.
Political polarization is a prominent component of politics in the United States. Scholars distinguish between ideological polarization and affective polarization, both of which are apparent in the United States. In the last few decades, the U.S. has experienced a greater surge in ideological polarization and affective polarization than comparable democracies.
Vincent Lamont Hutchings is an American political scientist. He is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. In 2022, Hutchings was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.
