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International Journal of Public Opinion Research 2008 20(2):224-236; doi:10.1093/ijpor/edn014
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The World Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.

Militant Nationalist Electoral Support: A Measurement Dilemma

John Coakley

Address correspondence to John Coakley, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland, E-mail: john.coakley@ucd.ie

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

It could by no means be argued that efforts to predict election results from public opinion data have an unblemished track record. From the disastrous misprediction of the U.S. presidential election in 1948 to the unheralded victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian election, pollsters have been criticized for ‘getting it wrong’, with shortcomings in the United Kingdom in 1992 and in France in 2002 attracting particular academic attention (Curtice, 1997, p. 317; Miguet, 2002, p. 207).

In principle, serious failure in election forecasting should be a source of greater worry to newspaper editors than to academic political analysts, who are more concerned with understanding long-term trends than with offering ephemeral insights into the future. There are, however, circumstances where there is a serious problem of systematic bias in opinion data, an issue taken up further here. Northern Ireland is such an example: politically militant views have tended . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   MEASUREMENT PROBLEMS
 

   POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS
 
SOCIAL CONFORMITY
POLITICIAL AMBIVALENCE

   IMPLICATIONS FOR ANALYSIS
 

   CONCLUSION
 

   APPENDIX: INFORMATION ON THE SURVEYS USED
 

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