ObjectiveIncreasing the price of cigarettes reduces consumption, with a global price elasticity of approximately −0.4. In the UK where the cost of cigarettes is already relatively high, there is an ...issue surrounding public acceptance of further price rises ahead of the inflation rate. Previous research suggests that price increases may be supported where funds are dedicated to tobacco control. This study assessed public support in England for such a policy.MethodsA cross-sectional household survey was conducted in England between August 2008 and January 2009. A representative sample of 8736 respondents aged 16+, of whom 1900 (22%) were cigarette smokers at the time of the survey, was recruited. The primary outcome measure was support for a 20p (4%) price increase on a pack of cigarettes with proceeds going to fund tobacco control activities.Results6216 participants (71%), including half (47%) of current cigarette smokers, indicated that they would support a 20p price increase if funds were dedicated to tobacco control activities. Levels of support among smokers were similar across the social gradient and gender. Younger smokers were more likely to support the increase. Smokers who smoked 0–10 cigarettes per day were more supportive of the increase than heavier smokers.ConclusionsThere is broad public support for raising the cost of cigarettes with funds being used for tobacco control activities. The absence of a social gradient among smokers concurs with other research showing that more disadvantaged smokers are as engaged with tobacco control objectives as more affluent smokers.
The Seats-Votes model forecasts party seat shares in the House of Commons using data from general elections and opinion polls between 1945 and 2009. The model is built on a generalisation of the cube ...rule which provided a fairly accurate method of translating votes into seats when Britain was effectively a two party system prior to the 1970s. It combines past information on seat shares in the current Parliament with voting intention data six months prior to the general election to forecast seat shares. Applied to the task of forecasting the outcome of a general election in early May of 2010, it predicts a hung Parliament, with the Conservatives as the largest party. The relatively small sample used to estimate the model means that predictions about the size of the parties in Parliament are quite tentative, though predictions about the likelihood of a hung Parliament are more certain.
// ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: Is Quebec society being militarized? The question may appear nonsensical given the fact that it is commonly accepted that Quebecers are more pacifists than their Canadian ...neighbours. This article rigorously examines the question. It begins by providing a typology of potential attitudes held by Quebecers regarding international security issues. It then tests these against dozens of polls conducted during the last quarter of a century. The results are paradoxical. While Quebecers continue to hold long-standing anti-imperialistic values, they nonetheless express strong militaristic attitudes vis-a-vis foreign and defence policy issues.
This article reports new empirical evidence on probabilistic polling, which asks persons to state in percent-chance terms the likelihood that they will vote and for whom. Before the 2008 presidential ...election, seven waves of probabilistic questions were administered biweekly to participants in the American Life Panel (ALP). Actual voting behavior was reported after the election. We find that responses to the verbal and probabilistic questions are well-aligned ordinally. Moreover, the probabilistic responses predict voting behavior beyond what is possible using verbal responses alone. The probabilistic responses have more predictive power in early August, and the verbal responses have more power in late October. However, throughout the sample period, one can predict voting behavior better using both types of responses than either one alone. Studying the longitudinal pattern of responses, we segment respondents into those who are consistently pro-Obama, consistently anti-Obama, and undecided/vacillators. Membership in the consistently pro-or anti-Obama group is an almost perfect predictor of actual voting behavior, while the undecided/vacillators group has more nuanced voting behavior. We find that treating the ALP as a panel improves predictive power: current and previous polling responses together provide more predictive power than do current responses alone.
Objective. This article examines the factors that form voters' perceptions of the parties' chances of winning at both the national and the local levels. Method. We make use of the 1988 Canadian ...Election Study and we employ a HLM model to estimate the effect of individual-level and contextual-level variables. Results. It is shown that voters' expectations are affected by a combination of "objective" contextual information and personal preferences (projection effects). Conclusion. The basic contextual information that is utilized to ascertain local chances is the outcome of the previous election in the local constituency, whereas polls are crucial in the case of perceived national chances. We also find that the most politically aware are more strongly influenced by "objective" indicators.
This article proposes a new measure of the predictive accuracy (A) of election polls that permits examination of both accuracy and bias, and it applies the new measure to summarize the results of a ...number of preelection polls. We first briefly review past measures of accuracy, then introduce the new measure. After the new measure is described, the general strategy is to apply it to three presidential elections (1948, 1996, and 2000) and to compare the results derived from it to the results obtained with the Mosteller measures. Then, the new measure is applied to the results of 548 state polls from gubernatorial and senatorial races in the 2002 elections to illustrate its application to a large body of preelection polls conducted in “off-year” races with different outcomes. We believe that this new measure will be useful as a summary measure of accuracy in election forecasts. It is easily computed and summarized, and it can be used as a dependent variable in multivariate statistical analyses of the nature and extent of biases that affect election forecasts and to identify their potential sources. It is comparable across elections with different outcomes and among polls that vary in their treatment or numbers of undecided voters.
Contrary to much of the literature on collective opinion, I find that the low levels and uneven social distribution of political knowledge in the mass public often cause opinion surveys to ...misrepresent the mix of voices in a society. To assess the bias introduced by information effects, I compare “fully informed” collective preferences simulated from actual survey data to collective preferences revealed in the original data. Analysis of policy questions from the 1988 and 1992 American National Election Studies shows that group differences in knowledge, along with the public's modest average level of political knowledge, can cause significant distortions in measures of collective opinion. The mass public may appear more progressive on some issues and more conservative on others than would be the case if all citizens were equally well informed. To the extent that opinion polls influence democratic politics, this suggests that information effects can impair the responsiveness of governments to their citizens.
This paper defines two different ways of the process of the opinion formation and focuses on the effect of the proportion of the two strategies of process and the structure of the network. A ...multiopinion model is proposed in this paper, which includes two strategies of opinion formation. At the first part, the change of the structured network and the change of the single node are used as two strategies of the process of the opinion formation. We focus on how the proportion of the two strategies can affect the outcome of the process. At the second part, as the proportion of the two strategies is fixed, the edges are dense in the community and sparse outside. Thus we can construct a bifurcation diagram to be verified through experimental study. The phase transition is studied in the network which contains more than four opinions and two strategies of process. Our results show that the size of the group and the dense of edges are the two important features for the process of opinion formation.
This paper addresses the importance of “knowledge” and “access to information” in the formation of young citizens’ opinion through deliberative procedures. The research presented in this paper is ...grounded in the theoretical framework of deliberative democracy as a democratic model and procedure that allows participants to be engaged in a rational and open dialogue before deciding on a particular issue. Our research draws empirically upon a deliberative event that took place in October 2014 at the Western Macedonia University of Applied Sciences in Greece. The topic of deliberation was “Political Public Opinion Polls.” The results of this study are commensurate with the dominant thesis in the relevant literature, which underlines that the deliberative procedure enriches the knowledge of citizens and thus enables them to participate effectively in the decision making process.
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