I don’t know how many of you reading this have ever fielded your own survey (or paid for someone else to field a survey you’ve designed), but one frustrating part of this enterprise is that you spend hours and hours trying to come up with great questions for your survey, only to revisit the data years later and realize that 90% of the questions you spent all that time thinking about have never made it anywhere near one of your published papers. Fortunately, we now have blogs…
With that in mind, here’s the result of a survey question we asked in Poland in 2006 at the height of the “Kaczynski era”, when Lech Kaczynski was president of Poland and his twin bother Jaroslaw was the Prime Minister. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time twins have ever held the two highest executive offices in the land simultaneously anywhere. So what did the Polish people think about this situation at the time?
Interestingly, when Lech Kaczynski was elected President of Poland in 2005, it was (a) immediately following the parliamentary elections, which had been won by the party his brother headed and (b) in the second round of of a two-round majoritarian system, which meant that a majority of voters had to vote for him in the second round for him to be elected (and indeed he had received 54% of the vote). Following the partliamentary elections brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski had announced that he, personally, would not become prime minister, in part to reduce apprehension over the prospect of twins as president and prime minister. However, J. Kaczynski installed himself as prime minister in July of 2006, and our survey was taken two months later. An interesting research question would be to try to disentangle whether the answer to this question simply reflected disenchantment with the Kaczynski’s and their Law and Justice political party – they would go on to be soundly defeated in the 2007 parliamentary elections – and how much hostility towards twins holding the two highest offices in the land was (is) exogenous to the performance of the Kaczynskis and PiS and therefore might have actually instead been a partial contributing factor to PiS’s defeat in 2007.
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Wow, what a horrible plot, taking an ordered variable and making the order nearly impossible to see!
Once the plot is improved, it would make a lot of sense to compare these approval figures to approvals of other politicians in this country, and of these same politicians at a different time.
I’m sure it’s difficult to do research in Poland, so I’m not saying I could do better. Still, I don’t know how much you can get from a single snapshot like this.
I don’t know – I kind of liked the fact that the pie chart gave a quick intuitive feel for the proportions of the population having differnt opinions on the question, and essentially lets the viewer “group” the categories however s/he likes. The main point I was trying to convey was that about 2/3 of the survey respondents had soured on the idea of having twins in the top two positions in the country. Also, while the data is ordinal, the “don’t know” category is not ordinal, and the pie chart allows you to throw it in there without implying it is ordinal.
For the record, my biggest concern with the plot was the small type of the sub-heading which identifies the actual question, but I couln’t quite figure out how to do it another way and keep all the text in there. I’ll keep working on it though!
“Had soured” implies a comparison with a previous pll, no?
Regarding Don’t Know responses, the simplest approach would be a barchart with a gap between the last bar and the Don’t Know category. Or you could simply renormalize and report the Don’t Know percentage as a number in the caption.
The point I was trying to make (re: “had soured”) in the post was the implicit comparison between the election, when a majority of voters (admittedly not the same thing as poll respondents) had at least endorsed the possibility of the tandem by electing L. Kaczynski president.
I agree with Andrew; such a vague pie chart doesn’t completely justify how the Polish people feel towards the Twins in power. Also, other countries opinions towards the matter i think would be be more beneficial as a way to see the wide scale of how the situation effects other countries as well as Poland. The chart just doesn’t represent the opinions of these people to the best of its ability, especially when their opinions are the most important .
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