Institutional research on public opinion and participative devices. From polls to public debate

The welfare effects of public opinion polls

This paper presents an experimental study of the effects of polls on voters’ welfare. The analysis shows that polls have a different effect on closely divided and lopsided divided electorates. The data show that in closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information on the voters’ distribution of preferences significantly raises the participation of subject...

From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series

We connect measures of public opinion measured from polls with sentiment measured from text. We analyze several surveys on consumer confidence and political opinion over the 2008 to 2009 period, and find they correlate to sentiment word frequencies in contemporaneous Twitter messages. While our results vary across datasets, in several cases the correlations are as high as 80%, and capture impor...

Deliberative Polls: toward Improved Measures of "informed" Public Opinion?

New research techniques have recently been developed to gather measures of public opinion that is better informed or more deliberative than that recorded in typical mass opinion surveys. These techniques include deliberative polls, educational surveys, and citizen planning cells. In view of what they set out to accomplish, what can we say from a scientific perspective about the utility of these...

Toward an Understanding of the Cyclical Formation of Public Opinion: Presidential Approval Ratings and Public Opinion Polls

public opinion and public policy (theoretical subject)

public opinion is one of the key elements that affects public policy. the importance of public opinion depends on the type of political system, and the process of public policy is also affected by the nature of political system. therefore the effect of public opinion on public policy is different, on the basis of the nature of the political system. the purpose of this article is to analyze this...