Other Public Opinion Bloggers

In addition to websites containing poll reports and other public opinion data, other people's blog posts might serve as a useful source for your blogging activities: You can follow their links to poll reports you might not have noticed otherwise; you can respond to them (either in their comments or in posts of your own); and you can use many of them as models of good blogging style and etiquette.

Brendan Nyhan, for example, is a political scientist and media critic who frequently blogs about public opinion, as in these exemplary posts about a CNN poll about President Obama's place of birth and the recent Pew Research Center survey results regarding American's beliefs about Obama's religion (as we discussed briefly on the first day of class).

The Monkey Cage is a group blog by political scientists who post on a variety of subjects, often including public opinion. Recently, it's had public opinion-related posts about taxation, illegal immigrants and birthright citizenship, and of course the results of the Pew survey about about Obama's religion.

Several pollsters also maintain blogs, including the group at Pollster.com, a site we'll be using in class later on in the semester to discuss how election tracking polls work and what they're good for. Many of their posts are strictly informational, as in this one, which presents some of the results of a Public Policy Polling survey of Louisianans' opinions about the Gulf Coast oil spill. Others are more analytical, though, including this one on the Pew survey everyone's been talking about.

There's also "The Numbers" blog, where ABC News' polling director Gary Langer writes about a wide variety of public opinion topics. His posts from this past summer have included discussions about immigration, race, and, of course, Americans' beliefs about Obama being Muslim.


Finally, there are some blogs devoted to specific issues -- including several that you all are focusing on this semester -- that periodically have posts dealing with public opinion. You can use the Google Blog search engine to find ones that are relevant to your issue.