If we didn't have polls, opinion would be shaped by radio shock jocks
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Version 0 of 1. It’s easy to be cynical about opinion polls. I should know, for the last year and a half I’ve been conducting them. It’s difficult to imagine the fortnightly Newspoll, Australia’s “gold standard” in political polling, having anywhere near the influence it now enjoys, if people knew the truth about those who run it. Strip away the prestige, speculation and analysis in the days following its release, and you’re left with a room full of hungover 20-somethings, begrudgingly soliciting the pulse of the nation. But as we know, this cynicism isn’t just limited to my office. The failure of pollsters in the UK to predict the scale of the Conservative’s victory during this year’s general election not only called into question the validity of political polling, but has raised questions about its influence on politics. As the Guardian’s editors put it: ... election campaigns are supposed to interrogate alternative futures, but the interrogation necessarily concentrates on those futures that look more likely ... Had the forecasts been different, then the nightly news bulletins would surely have concentrated rather more on the vast spending cuts to come, and rather less on the potential role of Scottish nationalists in a hung parliament. Australians are no strangers to the effects of polling on our politics. Despite cries from our leaders that they “don’t pay too much attention to polling”, the Rudd-Gillard disaster, and Abbott’s tenuous hold on his prime ministership, would tell us otherwise. Consecutive federal governments have been criticised for being out of touch with the public, and far too driven by focus groups and opinion polls. However, as Newspoll’s chief executive, Martin O’Shannessy has said: “If we didn’t have published polling then opinion would be shaped by talkback radio jocks rather than people who are actually responding to polls.” To paraphrase Churchill, political polls are the worst system of measuring public opinion, except all the others. In the wake of the UK election, the British Polling Council announced it will be conducting an inquiry into the reasons behind its members flawed predictions. Many of the challenges UK pollsters faced, such as the impact of mobile-only households on their ability to build representative samples, are also a growing concern in Australia. However, this narrow focus on methodological issues prevents a broader questioning of the role polling should play in modern democracies. In its current form, polling serves to showcase the worst of horserace politics, feeding the cynicism of the masses, as politicians and the media obsess about the week’s “preferred leader” numbers. It’s not particularly fun being a tele-pollster, and I apologise to everyone dragged away from a family dinner, or woken on a Sunday morning, for the purpose of one of our surveys. However, there are shoots of light. Last night for example, I was finishing up 20-minute survey with a retiree when she stopped to thank me for calling her. “We complain that nothing get’s done in politics,” she said, “but if we don’t tell them what we think, then they’re never going to change.” In its highest form, polling could be so much more than speculation about electoral outcomes. Randomised sampling, if done correctly, has the potential to bridge the gap between our elected representatives and their constituents on matters of public policy – and highlight areas where they are letting us down. We have seen this already on matters such as marriage equality, where opinion polls have consistently highlighted the gap between public support for equal marriage, and the political inertia on this issue. Unfortunately, as long as polling continues being treated as a political commodity, this doesn’t look like a future we’ll travel toward. A few weeks ago my employer, Newspoll, told us they were shutting down our office and automating our work through a robopoll and online survey. Whether this was simply cost-cutting, or an attempt to keep pace with technology, is a question yet to be answered. The new methodology already has its critics, including our lead researcher who was quoted in the Guardian this morning as calling it “crap”. To me, the question isn’t whether the new poll will be accurate, but how the change in technology can be used to strengthen the contribution polls can make to the functioning of our democracy. |