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Guns vs Butter? What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?
Guns vs Butter? What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?
Public opinion researchers depend on certain questions as essential public opinion barometers, like presidential job approval or Bud Roper’s right-direction/wrong-track measure. Perhaps no other question is as often used to determine what is foremost in the minds of the public than the open-ended “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” Respondents offer their concerns in their own words, unaffected by potential bias introduced by limited lists of answers. Access the most important problem datasets here.
Public opinion researchers depend on certain questions as essential public opinion barometers, like presidential job approval or Bud Roper’s right-direction/wrong-track measure. Perhaps no other question is as often used to determine what is foremost in the minds of the public than the open-ended “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” Respondents offer their concerns in their own words, unaffected by potential bias introduced by limited lists of answers. Access the most important problem datasets here.
Compared to What? Media-guided Reference Points Dataset
Compared to What? Media-guided Reference Points Dataset
How do voters evaluate the state of the economy when making a choice at the polls? Conventional economic voting literature suggests a simple answer: A good economy helps incumbents in a given election but a bad economy hurts them. How then do voters differentiate a ‘good’ economy from a ‘bad’ economy? Are all positive numbers in growth rates (i.e. 0.1%, 2%, 5% etc. ) understood as ‘good’ while negative ones are ‘bad’? Since the data does not speak for itself, people tend to base their assessments on comparison between their own absolute performance and reference points.
How do voters evaluate the state of the economy when making a choice at the polls? Conventional economic voting literature suggests a simple answer: A good economy helps incumbents in a given election but a bad economy hurts them. How then do voters differentiate a ‘good’ economy from a ‘bad’ economy? Are all positive numbers in growth rates (i.e. 0.1%, 2%, 5% etc. ) understood as ‘good’ while negative ones are ‘bad’? Since the data does not speak for itself, people tend to base their assessments on comparison between their own absolute performance and reference points.
By looking at domestic media from Lexis-Nexis, I find spatial reference point across elections from 33 democracies since the 1980s. This dataset is available in my article titled, “Compared to What? Media-guided Reference Points and Relative Economic Voting” in Electoral Studies (2020).
