Irish Opinion Poll Archive
Public Opinion polls on a range of political and social topics have been carried out regularly in the Irish Republic since the mid 1970s by Lansdowne Market Research and its sister company Irish Marketing Surveys (now Millward Brown IMS) and by Market Research Bureau of Ireland (now TNS MRBI). Many polls have been carried out for the press, notably the Irish Times and the Independent Newspapers group and work has also been carried out for the various political parties. IRISH POLITICAL STUDIES has carried summaries of MRBI polls since 1985 and IMS polls since 1994.
Professor Michael Marsh supervised a project to locate and assemble in a machine readable form the findings of as many of these polls as possible. This was aided by a grant from the Irish SSRC, with further assistance from the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin and the welcome cooperation of the various polling companies as well as the clients who commissioned the original work. Recent revision of the Search routine was carried out by Jos Elkink of the Department of Political Science.
The findings archived are response distributions on various questions for the sample as a whole and for various sample sub-groups, including typically party support [vote intention], region, age, class and gender. The period covered here is from the mid 1970s up to 1999. A Search can be made by question/answer keywords or phrases.
The collection does not include surveys which are already available through international archives, like those done for Eurobarometer and the European Values Surveys. Nor does it include the original data sets.
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View Charts of 1976-2005 Trends Governments –– Parties –– Leaders These have compiled from the Archive and other sources by Patrick Lyons, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science. |
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The Archive is freely available to everyone. However, publications using data obtained here should give proper acknowledgment both to the Archive and to those who commissioned and carried out the original surveys.
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Updated 4/1/2006