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Online Political Study to Fill Polling Gaps
YouGov has announced that it will work on a large-scale project funded by the American National Science Foundation (NSF) and centred around a monthly tracking study of the British electorate, administered online.
YouGov will work with two partner organisations, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Essex. The project, entitled 'Government Performance, Valence Judgments, and The Dynamics of Party Support', is valued at $378,000.
The study will closely monitor public reactions to government performance in several crucial policy areas including healthcare, education, transport, crime, management of the economy, and the war on terrorism. 1,000 respondents will take part each month, enabling in-depth monitoring of party support and vote intentions over a four year period.
The team includes David Sanders and Paul Whiteley from the University of Essex, and Marianne Stewart and Harold Clarke from the University of Texas in Dallas. According to Clarke, who is the principal investigator on the project, 'If you only survey the electorate at every general election - every four or five years - there are going to be large gaps in the data. Important movements in public opinion can occur long before an election campaign officially begins. This monthly, ongoing sampling of opinion will help us understand factors affecting the dynamics of support for the parties and lay the groundwork for our study of the next general election'.
YouGov was launched in 2001 and claims to regard itself as 'the UK's most accurate pollster... having been the closest [to the true result] on all six occasions where it polled prior to an actual outcome, with an average error of less than 1%'.
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