This paper analyses changes in public opinion by tracking political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online. Unlike polls or surveys, our approach does not elicit opinions but approximates what the public thinks by analysing the discussions in which they decide to take part. We measure the emotional content of online discussions in three dimensions (valence, arousal and dominance)...

The Bradley effect concerns the discrepancy between opinion polls and actual election outcomes that emerges when candidates do not exhibit ideological, sexual or racial mainstream features. This was first observed during 1982 for Governor of California resulted in a significant loss black Democratic candidate, Tom Bradley, despite him being ahead polls. It has been argued poll respondents may t...

This article seeks to address current debates comparing polls and opinion mining as empirically based figuration models of public in the light in-depth intellectual on role nature that began after French Revolution controversy over spurred by invention polls. Issues historical quantification re-conceptualisation are addressed four parts. The first summarises history rise fall concept opinion. s...

We develop a formal model of opinion polls in elections and study how they influence the voting behaviour of the participating agents, and thereby election outcomes. This approach is particularly relevant to the study of collective decision making by means of voting in multiagent systems, where it is reasonable to assume that we can precisely model the amount of information available to agents ...

Over the last decade considerable attention has been given to the possibilities of predicting political and other events by observing the outcome of appropriately designed experimental markets. In the Iowa Presidential Stock Market (cf. Forsythe et al. [1992]) the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was predicted successfully through observations of a stock market, where individual experi...

This thesis consists of two parts: an exploration of new measures of backbench opinion in the UK House of Commons, and an exploration of variance stabilising transformations of count data. In the first part, we consider the use of Early Day Motions (EDMs) as a means of gauging opinions of Members of Parliament (MPs) over a range of issues. A much used measure of opinion is that of cohesion; how...