Probing Public Opinion: the State of Valencia Experience

This paper summarizes the procedures which have been set up during the last years at the Government of the State of Valencia, Spain, to systematically probe its public opinion as an important input into its decision processes.After a brief description of the electoral setup, we (i) outline the use of a simulated annealing algorithm, designed to find a good design for sample surveys, which is based on the identification of representative electoral sections, (ii) describe the methods used to analyze the data obtained from sample surveys on politically relevant topics, (iii) outline the proceedings of election day -detailing the special problems posed by the analysis of exit poll, representative sections, and early returns data - and (iv) describe a solution to the problem of estimating the political transition matrices which identify the reallocation of the vote of each individual party between two political elections.Throughout the paper, special attention is given to the illustration of the methods with real data. The arguments fall entirely within the Bayesian framework.