Political opinion polls in Australia, 2004-07

Description

The results of 239 published opinion polls measuring vote intentions (1st preference vote intention in a House of Representatives election) between the 2004 and 2007 Australian Federal elections, from 4 survey houses.

Usage

data(AustralianElectionPolling)

Format

A data frame with 239 observations on the following 14 variables.

ALP

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as intending to vote for the Australian Labor Party

Lib

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as intending to vote for the Liberal Party

Nat

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as intending to vote for the National Party

Green

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as intending to vote for the Greens

FamilyFirst

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as intending to vote for the Family First party

Dems

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as intending to vote for the Australian Democrats

OneNation

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as intending to vote for One Nation

DK

a numeric vector, percentage of respondents reported as expressing no preference or a “don't know” response

sampleSize

a numeric vector, reported sample size of the poll

org

a factor with levels Galaxy, Morgan, F2F, Newspoll, Nielsen and Morgan, Phone, indicating the survey house and/or mode of the poll

startDate

a Date, reported start of the field period

endDate

a Date, reported end of the field period

source

a character vector, source of the poll report

remark

a character vector, remarks noted by author and/or research assistant coders

Details

Morgan uses two modes: phone and face-to-face.

The 2004 Australian election was on October 9; the ALP won 37.6% of the 1st preferences cast in elections for the House of Representatives. The ALP won the 2007 election (November 24) with 43.4% of 1st preferences.

The ALP changed leaders twice in the 2004-07 inter-election period spanned by these data: (1) Mark Latham resigned the ALP leadership on January 18 2005 and was replaced by Kim Beazley; (2) Beazley lost the ALP leadership to Kevin Rudd on December 4, 2006.

The then Prime Minister, John Howard, announced the November 2007 election on October 14, 2007.

Source

See the source variable. Andrea Abel assisted with the data collection.

References

Jackman, Simon. 2009. Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences. Wiley: Hoboken, New Jersey. Example 9.3.

Examples

data(AustralianElectionPolling)
xyplot(ALP ~ startDate | org, 
       data=AustralianElectionPolling,
       layout=c(1,5),
       type="b",
       xlab="Start Date",
       ylab="ALP")

## test for house effects
library(gam)
y <- AustralianElectionPolling$ALP/100
v <- y*(1-y)/AustralianElectionPolling$sampleSize
w <- 1/v
m1 <- gam(y ~ lo(startDate,span=1/10),
          weight=w,	      
          data=AustralianElectionPolling)
m2 <- update(m1, ~ . + org)
anova(m1,m2)