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Opinion Poll Today, Some Questions national |
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news report
 Friday May 16, 2003 18:01 by Killian Forde
 Some clarity is required on the benefit and accuracy of opinion poll 1. Why do the IT insist on using "(incl workers party)" in their "Others" section of opinion poll graphs, surely they could have a section for SP, WP, SWP when they are registering and not have the brackets business which will only reinforce attitudes of these parties 'being minnows'. 2. Does anyone understand the process of converting the core support into the adjusted support. For example Labours and FG core support is at 14% and SF at 7% but when it is transfered over to adjusted support we have figures of 22%(Lab) 20%(FG) and 9% (SF). The adjusted figure is the one used by the media to report the 'real' state of the parties. Anyone???? The reason I write this is that democracy by opinion poll destroyed any sort of debate taking place in the last election. They are taken as gospel by the media and influence voting patterns and transfer decisions. Therefore if we have them it is imperative that the methodologies are transparent. |
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Comments (6 of 6)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 61. over 70% of 'other party' votes in the last general election went to the Socialist Party. SP got about 15,000 votes- in comparison WP and SWP received a few thousand between them (and they ran more candidates).
To be accurate the polls should be "Others- including the Socialist Party"
2. I'm not sure how they work out 'core support'. I presume it's by asking a number of supplementry questions which determin the committment of the person to their party.
Core support means the percentage of people that actually say they would vote for that party. A certain percentage would answer "don't know". The pollsters then divide the "don't Knows" in the same percentage as the party percentages (ie if Labour gets 20% core vote then they are allocated 20% of the don't knows as well). This gives the adjuted support excluding the don't knows.
if some people say they would vote for party that no longer exists? or imagine, some people would like to be voted for but they cant be because their party no longer exists, do they just go away like slip away under the margin of error?
The adjusted support figures for parties (the ones that add up to 100%) are not necessarily made up simply by expressing the core support figures as a percentage of those expressing a preference. Many pollsters now weight the figures on the basis of past inaccuracies in their poll figures compared to election results: for example, if they have found that their opinion polls have consistently underestimated support for Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, and overestimated support for Fine Gael and Sinn Féin, they will weight the adjusted figures for each of these parties to a degree intended to adjust for these problems.
That said, I don't know whether this is the case in the MRBI poll in the Irish Times. I think it is, and if SF core support of 7% is turned into 9% adjusted support while Labour 14% becomes 22%, that would seem to indicate that this is being done.
How can someone support a party that does not exist?
From what I know the people are asked to fill out a questionairre with the names of the various parties already printed on it.
Good question.
Although for the answer you´ll have to take a look at what´s going on in the Basque Country.
The illegalising of Political parties, Youth Wings of Parties, democratic institutions, electoral platforms and the closing down of the only Basque language newspaper.