This thesis examines how the occupations people hold, and the social classes in which they are situated, affect the way in which they form and express opinions. At a theoretical level, it unites the 'deep-structure' macroanalysis of social theory with the individualised microanalysis of how subjects form and express opinions in opinion research, reviving an approach that has not been pursued since early-20th-century social research. At a practical level, it responds to several recent and prominent failures of prediction by the opinion polling industry, and asks whether a broader understanding of 'mass opinion' can help avert such failures in future. The thesis argues that opinions are subjects' judgments about their social conditions, based on mental pictures they have of these conditions that combine the values and attitudes they hold with the information they have about their environment. Subjects form opinions based on these pictures via three 'means of thinking'-personality-traits, emotions, and reason-and express them using two kinds of 'means of articulation'-bodily organs and media. The thesis shows how the variety of occupations subjects hold, and the extremity of class differentials between them, introduce substantial plurality into their values and attitudes, the way they acquire information, how they think, and how they articulate themselves. In particular, it highlights the considerable asymmetries between higher- and lower-class subjects regarding: which parts of their social conditions they are experts about, and how far they are influenced by others; whether they think about their conditions more emotionally or with reasoning; and how great a range and quality of opportunities they have to articulate their views. The thesis closes by suggesting that these findings offer opinion researchers and social theorists clear directions for measuring 'mass opinion' in new ways, and potentially emancipating the voices of subjects whose opinions are suppressed in late-modern society.

This diploma thesis Political parties and public opinion polls deals with the use of research in political party. From a theoretical point of view, the thesis focuses on defining the concept of public opinion, its influence on political tradition, and the importance of public opinion polls and their criticism. The main part of the thesis focuses on political communication introducing the use of methods and tools of political marketing, namely utilizing public opinion polls. It describes a change in political communication that has led to professionalization and the need to hire professionals from outside sources, and the role of media, which is often the only source of information for citizens. It explains the difference between particular mediated public opinion polls and focuses on their medial impact on voters. The research section have a form of a case study which focuses on how the public opinion polling is used to develop the electoral strategy in the political party TOP 09 before the elections to the regional councils in 2016. The result of the analysis shows that this political party is highly professionalized, continues to develop its electoral strategy based on research results, and follows recommendations of research agencies, using modern political marketing methods.

Diploma thesis Journalists and Public Opinion Polls: Media Representation of Public Opinion in the case of the First Direct Presidental Election in Czech Republic deals with an issue of media representation of public opinion polls and journalists' attitudes towards these polls. From the theoretical point of view this thesis focuses on definition of concepts such as public and public opinion, examination of how these concepts are approached within public opinion polls and investigation of possible influence of mediated public opinion polls on recipient of media messages. The main part of this thesis describes results of academic studies that address an issue of media coverage of pre-election polls. Analytic part is divided into two parts. The first part deals with media content analysis, the second one deals with journalists' attitudes towards polls. We can conclude that interviewed journalists are rather skeptical about public opinion polls while this scepticism is not followed by critical interpretation of pre-election poll results. This conclusion rises a question why journalists' sceptical attitude doesn't correspond with media coverage of polls that was found rather uncritical. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This three-paper dissertation aims to contribute to the study of the Mexican presidency, in particular, to the understanding of the origins and use of presidential polling, its role in the policy activity of the president, and the dynamics of presidential approval between 1989 and 2011. The dissertation draws upon the presidential polling, opinion-policy and approval research done in the United States. The first paper explores a topic that has not received much attention in Mexico, the origins and use of the presidential polling unit (PPU). The second paper focuses on presidential approval in Mexico, and the third analyzes, yet another understudied topic, the relationship between government spending (used as proxy for policy) and public opinion (collected by the PPU). The first paper relies on crosstabulations, text analysis, wordclouds and cluster analysis. Additionally, to offer an insider's view, I conducted a series of interviews to seven presidential staffers during the administrations of Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (Dec/1988-Nov/1994), Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (Dec/1994-Nov/2000), and Vicente Fox Quezada (Dec/2000-Nov/2006). The second and third papers made use of vector autoregression models to account for feedback effects among the spending and opinion variables, controlling, at the same time, for a possible `backwards' process in the opinion variables. The main assumption is that the variables are connected: all variables depend and/or explain each other.The first paper entitled "Origins and Use of Presidential Polling in Mexico" addresses the questions of what caused the creation of a government office dedicated to gauge public opinion, what poll information the presidents collected, and how it was used. I will argue that the institutionalization of public opinion within the presidency responded to the dynamics of the political system, in particular, to the changes in the electoral system and the outcome of the presidential election of 1988. The election of 1988 changed Mexico's electoral map and reconfigured the party loyalties against the ruling party PRI. Aware of this new political context, President Salinas used polling not only to study the political behavior of the Mexican voters but also as an alternative to verify electoral results. In fact, the first mandate of the presidential polling unit was to track political preferences. Eventually the use of public opinion polls expanded to other issues and became part of the presidential policy toolkit. As Jacobs and Shapiro (1995) pointed out in the case of the Kennedy administration, the Mexican presidency had now an office with "routinized procedures" to research and collect public opinion data. To identify the type of polling information collected by the presidents, in addition to interviews to presidential staffers, I applied text analysis on titles of all presidential polls conducted between 1989 and 2006. While all presidents collected opinion data on their approval ratings and customized their polling operations according to their own policy agenda, there were some overall differences. President Salinas centered his field polling operations around policy, and his phone polls for elections and presidential image. President Zedillo used field polls mostly for electoral issues and phone polls for image and communications. President Fox focused the field polls for government evaluation and customer satisfaction, and his phone polls for image and evaluation of political figures. How public opinion information was used remains an open chapter. All presidential insiders mentioned that information from public opinion polls was not specifically used to design policy but rather to test it, and to see what worked and what did not work. Polling was used to find ways to convince the public of the benefits of the presidential policies and actions. From this analysis, the conclusion is similar to what Jacobs (1992) argued in his paper on recoil effect. The presidents did use polling to try to move public opinion to their side, but also polling was used to understand what was in the mind of the public. Eventually, these efforts, I believe, made a significant contribution to the development of political public opinion and, most importantly, to the development of democratic values among the political elites.The second paper entitled "Presidential Approval in Mexico" looks at the factors that influence presidential approval using as reference research done in the United States and Mexico. I am looking for evidence that presidential approval in Mexico depends on factors directly connected to policy outcomes (Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson 2002). The risk of manipulation is at the center of this connection. The president may create the illusion of meeting the public's expectations (Kernel 1997) and/or opinion elites may misled the public against the president (MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson 1992). The argument here is that as long as presidential popularity is rooted in objective measures related to policy or economic outcomes, approval may actually be a reliable indicator of citizen's response to government actions and, therefore, a reliable measure of the president's political capital. Thus, the research question is whether approval depends on objective measures of the economy (and the overall situation of the country) or relies on the public's perceptions about the current conditions of the country. Furthermore, are those perceptions retrospective or prospective? Do they rely on what has been done or what is expected to be done? The findings presented in this paper confirm the expectations that the popularity of the Mexican president depends mostly on how the economy is doing and how the president deals with current salient issues like public safety (Buendia 1996; Gómez-Vilchis 2012). At the level of perceptions, prospective evaluations of personal well-being have a positive impact on approval but only among the richer segments of the population. It is important to notice that these perceptions are strongly influenced by the unemployment rates. The overall conclusion is that presidential approval in Mexico is rooted in macroeconomic, salient and subjective measures that are also connected to the dynamics of leading economic indicators. Presidential approval in Mexico depends, so far, on the president's capacity to solve problems.The third paper entitled "Government spending and public opinion in Mexico" explores the relationship between policy and public opinion. While this paper draws upon the opinion-policy research done in the United States, it departs from the policy preference approach to a perspective centered on policy outcomes. The main opinion variables included in the models refer to retrospective and prospective evaluations of personal well-being. These are generic and, in the question wording, do not refer to any issue in particular. One of the goals is to find whether these opinion variables are directly connected to trends in leading economic indicators (like growth of GDP percapita, unemployment, inflation). If such connection exists, then they may represent citizen's responses to current state of affairs of which the president and the government in general are perceived as responsible. This is, the opinion variables can be taken as responding to policy outcomes. The main underlying logic follows the Mood and Thermostatic models suggested by Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson (2002) and Soroka and Welzien (2010) respectively. If people started to feel that things are getting worse, then I would expect the government to increase spending, for example to stimulate the economy. Conversely, if people feel things are getting better, then I would expect the president to scale back on spending. The models show feedback in the economic but not in the public safety models (this is, the reciprocal effect between opinion and spending). In the models where economic spending is the contemporaneous outcome variable, positive prospective evaluations of personal well-being and perceptions that the economy is the most important problem (MIP) facing the nation show significant effects on spending. In the case of spending on public safety, negative prospective evaluation of personal well-being and the perceptions that public safety is the most important problem in the country play a significant role (but there is no feedback). An important finding is that the public attentiveness to economic issues (MIP) does explain a significant portion of the variance in spending on the economy. Regarding the impact of opinions by socioeconomic status, there is not enough evidence to conclude that the President listens more to a particular segment of the population. The results, however, seem to indicate a marginal difference in favor of the public with lower income and education levels. Overall, the findings presented here show a connection between presidential spending activity and public opinion. This suggests some responsiveness towards public opinion. Regardless of their own personal agendas, presidents have worked to improve the conditions of the citizens and responded to their perceptions of the general situation of the country. The fact that most of the population is still poor combined with the fact that polling is here to stay (along with the new impact of social media), has forced politicians to be responsive to the needs and wants of the public. As long as the public remains connected to its economic reality and pay attention to their immediate environment, any attempt of manipulation will not last long. The Mexican public is wise and, repeatedly in electoral processes, it has demonstrated strong and reasonable political culture. Mexican politicians are catching up with the public and this is a good thing. However, as democracy consolidates in Mexico, it may be possible to see the nature of responsiveness changing as the influence of traditional political elites fades and other forms of influence start taking over. Mexico is still in a democratic honeymoon.

The thesis titled Media and Pre-Election Polls: Quantitative Analysis of the Czech Major Daily Newspapers before Parliamentary Elections in 2010, deals with the manner in which the media grasp and process the results of opinion polls focused on the theme of elections, namely pre-election polls. The attitude of the author toward this topic is based on the agenda setting theory, which assumes that the media can, to some extent, set the topics and thus determine how (and that) the audience think about them. In the case of publication of pre- election surveys can therefore media, to some, but hardly detectable extent, influence the citizens-voters. For this reason it is important to focus on how exactly the mass media work with the statistic data and how they make them available to the wide public. Media coverage of these data should be complete and clear in order to prevent misinterpretation and for the data to be correctly handled. Through the quantitative content analysis of media outputs (in total 74 articles) from the five most popular Czech daily newspapers in the period January to May 2010 it was researched if the media work with pre-election polls results properly. Based on the analysis and its results, the recommendations were concluded for the situation to be improved.

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Diploma thesis "The cooporation of national daily press and agencies for research of public opinion in the Czech republic" attempts to describe from the practical point of view how mutual cooperation of agencies for public opinion research and the media, especially the press, looks. The chapters of theoretical part of diploma thesis deal with the historical development of public opinion researches in our country where the year 1989 is stressed as the separation turning-point and the foreign studies about the relation of public opinion polls and media. In the practical part of diploma thesis is detailed analysis of media presentation of public opinion polls in the press. At first it compares the different approach of the journalists and sociologists to the work with the informations about public opinion polls and then the way of media processing of public opinion polls in the newspaper in two different historical periods, namely in 1991 and 2009. The analysed materil contained the press releases by IVVM and by CVVM of the first five months 1991 and 2009 and the press articles where the journalists used the informations from this press releases. The media act in the diploma thesis in part as the users of informations about public opinion polls and in part as the initiators of these polls. The staff...

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2017-09-29T12:33:59Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Vitor Arzani Martins.pdf: 5095013 bytes, checksum: adea7007a39500128941c7fd5275e41a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-29T12:33:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vitor Arzani Martins.pdf: 5095013 bytes, checksum: adea7007a39500128941c7fd5275e41a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-09-18 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The following research is the result of an analysis that begins in 2015 and has the objective to analyze the relation between the newspaper “O Estado de São Paulo” and the influence that comes from its public by considering the opinion polls disclosed by the Instituto Brasileiro de Pesquisa de Opinião, also knows as IBOPE, into the crises that culminates in the Coup d´Etat in 1964. The studied period understands that the line that stars at Jânio Quadros resignation on august 25, 1961 to the Coup with the consequent deposition of his vice president, João Goulart, in april 1st, 1964, and have as research source the editions of the newspaper above mentioned and some opinion polls find in the Edgard Leuenroth Archive. Throughout the research, indications were found in the newspaper that corroborates to the hypothesis that “O Estado de São Paulo” selects its public by the kind of language and the graphic structure of the published pages, despite don’t considering almost ever the public opinion in its tireless work, creating a negative image of the João Goulart government. It was verified along the research that the newspaper build a kind of narrative with his journalistic content with the aim of causing in its pages an impression of chaos in the country. For these narratives, we attribute the name of “Catastrophic Narratives”. The result of the analysis present in this work is the confirmation of the fact that the newspaper doesn’t bother itself with the public opinion, but with the future judgment that it’s actions implies, by the fear that the conclusion that it was an elite tool to promote the coup threat its survival as a vehicle of “impartial” information and the perpetuation as a capitalist enterprise / A pesquisa a seguir é resultado do trabalho que começou em 2015 tendo como objetivo analisar a relação entre o jornal “O Estado de São Paulo” e a influência que emana de seu público, considerando pesquisas de opinião publicadas pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Pesquisa de Opinião, também conhecido como IBOPE, na crise que culminou no golpe de Estado em 1964. O período estudado compreende a linha que se inicia na renúncia de Jânio Quadros em 25 de agosto de 1961 até o golpe com a consequente deposição de seu vice-presidente João Goulart em 1 de abril de 1964 e tem como fontes de pesquisa as edições do jornal no período supracitado e algumas pesquisas de opinião encontradas no arquivo Edgard Leuenroth Ao longo da pesquisa foram encontrados indícios que corroboravam com a hipótese de que o jornal “O Estado de São Paulo” seleciona seu público pelo tipo de linguagem e estrutura gráfica de suas páginas publicadas, apesar de não considerar quase em nenhum momento a opinião pública em seu incansável trabalho de criar uma imagem negativa do governo de João Goulart. Foi verificado ao longo do trabalho que o periódico construiu narrativas com seu conteúdo jornalístico com o objetivo de causar em suas páginas uma impressão de caos no país. Para essas narrativas nós atribuímos o nome de “Narrativas catastróficas”. O resultado da análise presente neste trabalho é a confirmação do fato de que o jornal não se incomoda com a opinião de seu público leitor, mas sim com o julgamento futuro que suas ações implicam, pelo medo da conclusão de fora ele uma ferramenta da elite para a promoção do golpe, ameaçando sua sobrevivência como veículo “imparcial” de informações e sua perpetuação como empresa capitalista

Submitted by Milena Rubi (milenarubi@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-17T13:16:57Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCHTER_Johannes_2015.pdf: 611113 bytes, checksum: 55a3009a4bb5c0fe9f30edf98fe0bc77 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Milena Rubi (milenarubi@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-17T13:17:13Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCHTER_Johannes_2015.pdf: 611113 bytes, checksum: 55a3009a4bb5c0fe9f30edf98fe0bc77 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Milena Rubi (milenarubi@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-17T13:17:24Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCHTER_Johannes_2015.pdf: 611113 bytes, checksum: 55a3009a4bb5c0fe9f30edf98fe0bc77 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-10-17T13:17:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCHTER_Johannes_2015.pdf: 611113 bytes, checksum: 55a3009a4bb5c0fe9f30edf98fe0bc77 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-11-18 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / The popularity of social networks have attracted attention of companies. The growing amount of connected users and messages posted per day make these environments fruitful to detect needs, tendencies, opinions, and other interesting information that can feed marketing and sales departments. However, the most social networks impose size limit to messages, which lead users to compact them by using abbreviations, slangs, and symbols. Recent works in literature have reported advances in minimizing the impact created by noisy messages in text categorization tasks by means of semantic dictionaries and ontology models. They are used to normalize and expand short and messy text messages before using them with a machine learning approach. In this way, we have proposed an ensemble of machine learning methods and natural language processing techniques to find the best way to combine text processing approaches with classification methods to automatically detect opinion in short english text messages. Our experiments were diligently designed to ensure statistically sound results, which indicate that the proposed system has achieved a performance higher than the individual established classifiers. / A popularidade das redes sociais tem atraído a atenção das empresas. O crescimento do número de usuários e das mensagens enviadas por dia transforma esse ambiente em uma rica fonte de informações para descoberta de necessidades, tendências, opiniões e outras informações que podem auxiliar departamentos de vendas e marketing. Contudo,a maioria das redes sociais impõe limite no tamanho das mensagens, o que leva os usuários a usarem abreviações e gírias para compactarem o texto. Trabalhos na literatura demonstraram avanço na minimização do impacto de mensagens ruidosas nas tarefas de categorização textual através da utilização de dicionários semânticos e modelos ontológicos. Com a aplicação destes, as amostras são normalizadas e expandidas antes de serem apresentadas aos métodos preditivos. Assim, nesta dissertação é proposto um comitê de máquinas de classificação utilizando técnicas de processamento de linguagem natural para detectar opiniões automaticamente em mensagens curtas de texto em inglês. Os resulta-dos apresentados foram validados estatisticamente e indicaram que o sistema proposto obteve capacidade preditiva superior aos métodos preditivos isolados.

The thesis aims to discuss a theoretical framework of the U. S. congressional midterm elections and specify their fundamental funtions and importance. The thesis analyses the transformation of midterm elections as well as their effects on the political system with a special focus on the period 1990-2008. Following the analysis of particular midterm elections, it concludes that some of the theoretical premises need to be revised.