ABSTRACT
Public opinion polls are becoming increasingly prevalent both in the mainstream media as well as academic scholarship focusing on campaigns and elections. At the same time that the demand for survey research is growing, the face of modern polling is being revolutionized by advances in communications technology. On one hand, telephone surveys, the mainstay of the polling industry for the past 50 years, are suffering from very low response rates and the rapid growth of the cell phone-only population. Nearly a quarter of the adult population cannot be reached by pollsters over landlines and fewer than one-third of those who can be reached actually agree to be polled (Curtin, Presser, and Singer 2005). On the other hand, the rapid increase of internet penetration in American homes has made web-based polling a viable and affordable alternative for students of public opinion. Several consortia of scholars have begun institutionalizing new Internet surveys to study campaigns, such as the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP). Even the venerable American National Election Study (ANES) has begun to incorporate web-based surveys into its recent studies. Indeed, Internet surveys appear to be democratizing the study of campaigns and elections by making survey research methods available to a wider swathe of political scientists than ever before. Yet, despite the fast-paced adoption of Internet surveys by scholars studying campaigns and elections, significant (and often heated) debate about the validity of this approach persists. In this chapter, I examine how recent innovations in communications technologies have presented both challenges and opportunities for how survey researchers poll the public and, more specifically, how political scientists study campaigns and elections. I first discuss how phone surveys are being adapted to address these challenges and I then describe the methods being developed to conduct surveys over the Internet. The latter innovation has sparked controversy, which I also detail in this chapter. I follow by discussing some of the innovative work being conducted with Internet surveys before concluding with the claim that despite the methodological hurdles, Internet surveys will become increasingly popular among political scientists over the
next decade, largely due to the tremendous promise that these techniques hold for the study of campaigns and elections.
