Finding Political Data
Melody Dickison wrote, "On Professor Franklin's blog, Political Arithmetik, there is a graph that shows Bush's approval ratings in all polls from 2001 to 10/2006. Do you know if there is a similar graph somewhere giving the same info for Tony Blair?"My first thought was to look at the Angus Reid Consultants site.
Angus Reid's Global Monitor, "is a service dedicated to providing daily information on worldwide public opinion and assessing democratic processes around the world." On the web site you'll find the results of nearly 13,000 polls from all over the world.
A search of the Angus Reid site for "Tony Blair" comes up with 562 results, but only one deals with Tony Blair's approval rating. It compares the percentage of people expressing satisfaction with Blair's performance in January and March 2006.
A little more searching on Google led me to The UK Polling Report. It's a blog maintained by Anthony Wells. He includes links to many polls about British political issues.
One of them is a chart of Blair's approval rating that goes back to Jan. '05.
There's a report of party preference polls going back to 2001 (it's not Blair's popularity, but it's close).
And another that covers 1997-2001.
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:34 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Ken!
British polls usually go with "satisfied/dissatisfied" instead of "approve/disapprove."
Try this on our website: http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/searchSimpleResults/iw/1/keyword/blair%20and%20saisfied
Mario Canseco
Angus Reid Global Monitor
Many thanks to Mario Canseco of Angus Reid Global Monitor for the linguistic clue for searching British polls. English is a different language east of the Atlantic in many ways. (My son bought the last two Harry Potter books in the UK just so he could get all the extra vowels.)
Mario's URL for searching for Blair's "satisfied" rating contained a typo. Once I added a "t" to word "saisfied", the search suggestion brought up 61 polls on the Angus Reid web site.
There didn't seem to be summary of all the polls, but there were results of polls about the level of satisfaction with Blair and his government from August 1, July 21, July 4, June 9, May 31, May 17, May 14, April 5... The earliest one is from April 1, 2003.
You get the idea, that the raw material is there for surveying Blair's "satistifed" rating for the past 3 years. As a comparative exercise, those ratings could be compared to Bush's "approval" ratings over the same period (since the war in Iraq ties those leaders together).
The corrected URL for a search of the Angus Reid site is
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/searchSimpleResults/iw/1/keyword/blair%20and%20satisfied
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