This diploma thesis deals with political polarization of Czech society regarding the trust in all presidents from 1990 till today. It introduces the term 'political polarization' and its main research areas, especially various aspects of the electorate polarization. The thesis describes theories of voters' polarization, the specific relationship between polarization and ideological consistency, and topics of the polarizing influence of presidents, mass media and electoral process. The empirical section analyses the development of people's polarization in terms of trusting presidents and determines whether the groups declaring strong trust and distrust show specific sociodemographic characteristics, political orientation and political engagement. Datasets from The Public Opinion Research Centre's survey Our Society between the years 1990 and 2017 were used.

The objective of this paper is to retrospectively evaluate forecast models for polling data, to be used prospectively for the Swedish general election in 2022. One of the simplest ways of forecasting an election result is through opinion polls, and using the latest observation as the forecast. This paper considers five different forecasting models on polling data which are evaluated based on different error measures and the results are compared to previous research done on the same topic. The data in this paper consists of time series data of party-preference polls from Statistics Sweden. When forecasting polling data, the naive forecasting model was the most accurate, but forecasting the election in 2018 resulted in the forecast combinations model being the most accurate. Finally, the models are used to make forecasts on the Swedish general election taking place in September of 2022.

The recent developments in negotiations to reduce nuclear weapons in Europe mark a watershed in attitudes towards nuclear deterrence and security. On the one side lie all the old beliefs and assumptions about nuclear defence and security that have been common parlance for the last forty years and more. On the other side lies a unique opportunity to develop a new relationship of increased mutual trust between East and West that could ultimately lead to substantial reductions in the world's nuclear arsenal. The object of this thesis is to establish how much information already exists about attitudes towards nuclear deterrence and the processes of attitude change. From there, to extend these boundaries of knowledge in the belief that if we are able to understand more exactly what people think about nuclear deterrence, why they hold these attitudes and how attitudes change then we will be in a better position to ease the transitional stage between one set of attitudes and another. / Barrow and Geraldine S. Cadbury Trust

<p>I examined coverage of the 1997 Canadian federal election by 14 media organizations (including three 1television networks and 11 regionally important newspapers), analysing the relative importance of major election issues, and evaluating the reporting of the technical details of pre-election polls. The media played a passive role in covering the election, seldom evaluating party platforms, and emphasizing only those issues that the leaders of the major political parties introduced into the campaign. National unity dominated media coverage despite public opinion polls initially showing that voters had little interest in the issue. Only the NDP stressed health care and job creation -issues that the electorate considered most important -but the NDP was afforded less coverage than the other major parties, and coverage of these issues suffered as a result.</p> <p>Election coverage was also characterised by an emphasis on pre-election polls, where recently released poll results set the tone of coverage for other election stories. An analysis of the methods of 17 Canadian polling firms showed that there was much similarity in their survey practices. All firms used some form of probability sampling, and none used substandard methods, lending legitimacy to the media's reporting of preelection polls. The emphasis on polling results was accompanied by poor technical reporting, however.</p> <p>Finally, I examined published polling data for the five month period prior to the election to chart the dynamics of the campaign. I found that two events -the election call and the televised leaders' debates-apparently affected trends in voting intentions. During the course of the campaign, the Liberals and Bloc Quebecois experienced a decline in support, while the Reform Party and PC Party enjoyed increases in support. PC support seems to have been buoyed by the popularity of its leader, Jean Charest, following his performance in the English-language leaders' debate.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The diploma thesis Interpretation of Pre-election Polls in The Czech Printed Dailies studyies the ways in which media portrays data from election polls as part of thier news service. The thesis draws from theories of media effects, the research of which indicates a possible influence of media content on the formation of public opinion or even voting behaviour. For this reason, it maz be expected that the media present data in line with certain standards. However, in the Czech Republic, there is no code of conduct that would formulate such requirements. This leads to an ongoing struggle between the research agencies who supply such data and the media who present it to the public, where each party judges the content's quality by different measures. Some of the often criticised errors include misinterpretation of data and an insufficient explanation of the research's background. This paper uses quantitative content analysis to examine 154 articles from Czech printed journals across the three pre-election periods (2010, 2013, 2017) with the aim of determining in which form the results of pre- election polls are presented, and if all necessary data are added. The final analysis looks at the data as a whole as well as examining the trendlines during the studied time period. In conclusion, it evaluates...

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo estudar o voto dividido para as eleições municipais de 2004 e 2008 no Brasil. A análise está centrada em verificar se os eleitores votam em candidatos de partidos e/ou coligações diferentes em um mesmo pleito, ou seja, se dividem ou não o voto para prefeito e vereador. Considera-se aqui que a coordenação eleitoral entre os partidos e as elites políticas tem um papel estruturador para uma divisão ou não do voto, sendo que um dos indícios de maior coordenação eleitoral está relacionado à capacidade dos partidos em coordenar suas ações a partir das coligações eleitorais. Assim, os resultados expostos demonstram como a coordenação eleitoral dos partidos, além de resultar em um maior sucesso eleitoral, diminui a probabilidade de divisão do voto por parte do eleitor. / The current work aims to investigate the split vote for the municipal elections of 2004 and 2008 in Brazil. The study focuses on verifying whether the electorate votes for candidates from different parties and/or coalitions in the same round or not i.e. whether voters split their votes in between the mayor and city counsellor. It is taken for granted in the literature the fact that the electoral co-ordinations among the various parties and political elites has an influential role for the splitting or not of the vote. One of the main indicators of greater electoral co-ordination is related to the party ability to co-ordinate its actions as from electoral coalitions. Thus, the results show how the party electoral co-ordination, besides fostering a greater electoral success, reduces the probability of splitting the vote on the part of the voter.

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.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo estudar o voto dividido para as eleições municipais de 2004 e 2008 no Brasil. A análise está centrada em verificar se os eleitores votam em candidatos de partidos e/ou coligações diferentes em um mesmo pleito, ou seja, se dividem ou não o voto para prefeito e vereador. Considera-se aqui que a coordenação eleitoral entre os partidos e as elites políticas tem um papel estruturador para uma divisão ou não do voto, sendo que um dos indícios de maior coordenação eleitoral está relacionado à capacidade dos partidos em coordenar suas ações a partir das coligações eleitorais. Assim, os resultados expostos demonstram como a coordenação eleitoral dos partidos, além de resultar em um maior sucesso eleitoral, diminui a probabilidade de divisão do voto por parte do eleitor. / The current work aims to investigate the split vote for the municipal elections of 2004 and 2008 in Brazil. The study focuses on verifying whether the electorate votes for candidates from different parties and/or coalitions in the same round or not i.e. whether voters split their votes in between the mayor and city counsellor. It is taken for granted in the literature the fact that the electoral co-ordinations among the various parties and political elites has an influential role for the splitting or not of the vote. One of the main indicators of greater electoral co-ordination is related to the party ability to co-ordinate its actions as from electoral coalitions. Thus, the results show how the party electoral co-ordination, besides fostering a greater electoral success, reduces the probability of splitting the vote on the part of the voter.

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.