R: Political opinion polls in Australia, 2004-07

AustralianElectionPolling {pscl} | R Documentation

## 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)
    if(require(lattice)) {
        lattice::xyplot(ALP ~ startDate | org,
           data=AustralianElectionPolling,
           layout=c(1,5),
           type="b",
           xlab="Start Date",
           ylab="ALP")
    }

    ## test for house effects
    y <- AustralianElectionPolling$ALP/100
    v <- y*(1-y)/AustralianElectionPolling$sampleSize
    w <- 1/v
    m1 <- mgcv::gam(y ~ s(as.numeric(startDate)),
              weight=w,
              data=AustralianElectionPolling)
    m2 <- update(m1, ~ . + org)
    anova(m1,m2)

[Package pscl version 1.5.2 Index]