A few quick follow-up thoughts on the work of Duke academics Peter Feaver, Christopher Gelpi and Jason Reifler, that I commented on last week.
The findings in the two papers by Feaver, Gelpi and Reifler are relatively straightforward. They conclude that the public’s prospective views of the potential for success in Iraq and judgments about the wisdom of going to war are both important in driving both electoral support for George Bush and a willingness to endure casualties in Iraq. However, their main finding is that prospective judgments about the chances for success are more important in determining the public’s willingness to tolerate casualties, while retrospective judgments about the wisdom of going to war were more important in driving electoral support for George Bush in 2004.
The papers are persuasive — but as always with this sort of academic study — will be the subject of continuing debate and discussion. Those interested in the nitty-gritty details should review the two papers, as well as the reactions from various academics with expertise in this area in the comments section of MP’s two posts last week.
Regular MP readers may be more interested in a methodological footnote. The data reported by Feaver, Gelpi and Reifler were collected on the Internet by the company Knowledge Networks (see the footnote on page 13 of the "Iraq the Vote" paper). They maintain a nationally representative panel of respondents that agrees in advance to participate in surveys fielded on the Internet. As MP summarized back in October:
What makes Knowledge Networks unique is that they recruit members to their panel with traditional random digit dial (RDD) sampling methods, and when a household without Internet access agrees to participate, they provide those households with free access to the Internet via Web TV. So in theory, at least, this approach allows a random sample of all US households.
Presumably, cost was the primary rationale for using Internet based research in this case. The expense involved in fielding six separate RDD telephone surveys of the adult population would have been considerably more expensive than the cost of using the Knowledge Networks (KN) panel, largely because the Internet surveys do not require paid interviewers. While the use of a pre-recruited panel rather than a stand-alone survey involves some trade-offs, Feaver, Gelpi and Reifler obviously considered those compromises worthwhile.
The use of the Knowledge Networks (KN) panel in this instance is unique for two reasons. First, the authors were interested in a sample of all U.S. adults, not just a small and hard to identify subgroup. The best known applications of KN panel for political polling has involved surveys of debate watchers, such as those conducted by CBS News and the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg last fall. Second, as the article in last week’s Washington Post makes clear, the results from the surveys have been taken seriously at the very highest levels of the U.S. government. If nothing else, this confluence of events strikes MP as something of a milestone for Internet based opinion research.
And before we turn to other subjects (including at some point, I promise, a more thorough discussion of Internet based surveys), I’d like to correct one misimpression I may have left about the work of the Duke academics. While Peter Feaver has apparently taken leave of his academic position to accept a position with the Bush administration, the polling cited above was not conducted on behalf of President Bush or any other political partisan. It was academic research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation and released into the public domain. Both Christopher Gelpi and Jason Reifler remain in academia.
