Introduction

Public opinion surveys provide critical information about the public’sissue priorities and policy positions. They provide insights intocitizens’ ideas, beliefs, preferences, attitudes, values andopinions, and provide information on what they want from their government.In a democracy, policy-makers define policy priorities, take politicaldecisions and adapt existing policies, taking into account citizens’preferences on issues (see Page, 1994; Przeworski et al, 1999). As Gallup(1957: 27) pointed out long ago, ‘Without polls, [elites] would beguided only by letters to congressmen, the lobbying of pressure groups, andthe reports of political henchmen’.

A large body of studies focuses on the link between public opinion data andpolicy-making (see Rothmayr and Hardmeier, 2002; Petry and Mendelson, 2004;Heith, 2004; Druckman and Jacobs, 2006; Font et al, 2015; Berinsky, 2017).Some authors (Chaqués-Bonafont and Palau, 2011; Soroka and Wlezien,2010; Green-Pedersen and Walgrave, 2014; Baumgartner et al, 2019) focus onpolicy responsiveness and explain the conditions under which public opinionand political decisions correspond. In particular, Page and Shapiro (1992)demonstrate that policy changes follow shifts in public opinion (the US fromthe 1930s to the 1980s). In the case of Spain, Chaqués-Bonafont andPalau (2011) show that policy-makers follow the public’s issuepriorities with significant differences across issues and politicalactivities. Other authors (Druckman and Jacobs, 2006; Font et al, 2015)focus on a previous step and describe the type of public opinion surveysused by governments. These studies give an overview of the extent to whichpublic opinion data is available, whether public or/ and privateinstitutions conduct this research, whether public institutions directlycarry out survey research or rather outsource it to private institutions,and about which issues there are data available.

This chapter relates to this second kind of study. Its goal is to shed lighton public opinion survey data in Spain. The analysis relies on a noveldataset containing all the surveys carried out from 1978 to 2018 by theCentro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), the leading publicopinion data producer in Spain. For each survey, we have collectedinformation about the survey’s issues, the policy actor thatcommissioned the study, the target population, and the survey’sgeographical scope.