Measuring public opinion

In this video, we're going to talk about measuring public opinion. The first question to ask yourself is: why would we even want to measure public opinion? Well, if we live in a democracy where the public has a huge influence on our government, you want to know what they think.

You can think about the major institutions in our democracy. You could think about people who are in office, and when they're making a decision, they would love to know what the public actually thinks. One, they want to act on behalf of the public, and if they want to get re-elected by the public, it might be in their interest to know what the public thinks.

If you're in the midst of an election and you want to get elected, you might want to know what the public thinks about you. You might want to know what your chances of winning the election are, how your competitors are doing, or maybe what positions you should highlight, or maybe which positions you should listen to the public on.

Similarly, if you're an interest group, where does the public sit on different things? How does their opinion change over time? A lot of what the media does is help communicate to the people what is going on broadly in our society, and that includes what the people themselves are thinking.

Now that we know that we want to measure public opinion, what are the typical ways of doing so? You have the idea of a mass survey. This is a way of just asking a lot of people. You want to randomly sample and say, "What do you think about some position? What do you think about some social issue? What do you think about some law that is up for being passed? What do you think about some type of candidate?"

Now, the next three kinds of polls we have listed here you could view as related in a lot of ways to mass surveys, or even a more specialized type of mass surveys. You have the idea of a benchmark poll, and this is where at the beginning of, say, a campaign, you see how people feel about a certain issue or a certain candidate. Then, all future polls you can compare to that benchmark.

Entrance and exit polls are when people actually go to vote. When they're about to enter into the voting booth, you ask them, "Hey, how are you going to vote?" Or, right when they exit the voting booth, you ask them, "How or did you vote?" People aren't obliged to tell exactly what they did, but this will give an indication of what is likely to be the outcome of that election.

Related to both of these is the idea of a tracking poll. This is a situation where you might ask people at the beginning of some type of a campaign. It could be a campaign for a candidate or a campaign for a proposition. This time, you see, "Okay, what percentage of people are in favor of something?" This would be the percentage in favor, and this is time. Then, you periodically keep asking the same group of people how they feel about that candidate or that issue. You're going to be able to figure out how people's opinions about that candidate or issue change over time. You're going to be able to track that.

Then, a more focused way of understanding public opinion, which might not be as representative of the population as a whole, allows you to get more nuance and more conversation than these other four methods would be a focus group. This is where you try to bring in a representative sample of 5, 10, 15, or 20 folks and have a discussion with them about what they care about and why they care about these things.

So, I will leave you there. In the next video, we'll talk about what makes for a robust measure of public opinion.