Are opinion polls in elections helpful? In a couple of weeks time Germany is going to the polls. At the moment it seems that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats are likely to beat their opposition Social Democrats. How do we know this? Because opinion polls are carried out which give us some idea of how voters intend to vote in the forthcoming election. The most recent polls put the CDU and its Bavarian partner CSU on 39% with the Social Democrats trailing on 25% (though they have been inching upwards in recent weeks). Merkel has warned conservative supporters that they should not pay too much attention to these opinion polls lest they get a “rude awakening”. Of course all political leaders want to play down expectations of a big win – if their core votes think they will win easily they will be less likely to vote than if they think the race is too close to call. However opinion polls are sometimes wrong. In 2005 Merkel had a 21 point lead in the polls months before the election, this was down to five in the last polls before the election and on the night the gap turned out to only be a single point. In British Columbia’s (the Canadian state on the Pacific coast) most recent elections for state Premier the polls managed to be way out. All the polls predicted the New Democrats would win by around 8 points, yet in the event the liberals won by five, and this was despite some of the polls being on the final day of the campaign so not exactly allowing much time for voters to change their minds. This then is an immense miss which would make people wonder why they actually look at opinion polls. Some countries believe that there should not be opinion polls in the final days of a campaign, and some like France go so far as to ban polls in the days running up to the election. Germany does not do this but there is a gentleman’s agreement that polls won’t be run in the ten days before the country votes. This is because it is believed that the opinion polls, rather than the parties’ policies, might influence voters when they come to casting their vote. There are a couple of possible ways in which opinion polls can effect a voter’s decision. First it might encourage voters to follow the majority due to a desire to pick the winner; studies in the US suggest that holding a lead in the polls gives a 4-5 percent bump among undecided when they come to vote. This is insignificant if there are only a small number of undecideds but in the German election there may be as many as 38% of voters undecided so a lead in the polls could result in getting almost 2% more votes overall – a significant number that could swing an election. But it also works the other way because opinion polls can also make people less likely to vote if they believe the election is already going a certain way and therefore their vote won’t count. This is usually considered to most influence the party that is in the lead whose marginal supporters feel there is no need to take the effort to get the result they want, but their opponents’ voters are also likely to be discouraged. If polls can make a difference in elections they can still have an impact when the elections are over and new ones are a long way off. Opinion polls are still conducted even if the next election is likely to be years away and movements in the polls can still damage or help secure the position of a leader. With polling on all sorts of issues the opinion polls can help to decide whether a leader sticks with a policy or changes direction. Responsiveness to the electorate might be a good thing, it does after all give the opinion of the people some weight between the events in which they can really have a say. On the other hand opinion polls can sometimes be used to deny the people their say; Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2007 initially intended to call elections in the autumn but opinion polls made the possible election appear to be close so the Prime Minister decided not to take the gamble. No one would suggest banning opinion polls altogether – some, particularly those asking about specific issues, can be very useful when we consider how blunt an instrument a general election is at telling us exactly what voters wanted. But would banning polls during election campaigns be helpful? At this time the public should be looking at the parties policies and arguments, not at each other’s voting intentions. Debatabase debate ‘This house believes that opinion polls harm the democratic process’ idebate.org/debatabase/debates/politics/house-believes-opinion-polls-harm-democratic-process theglobeandmail/news/politics/why-were-the-polls-completely-wrong-about-the-bc-election/article11935336/ spiegel.de/international/germany/german-polling-companies-under-fire-for-waning-reliability-of-data-a-920693.html spiegel.de/flash/flash-21034.html news.msn/politics/do-polls-influence-the-outcome-of-the-election
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 13:52:26 +0000
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