Opinion polls, crystal balls and other agents of augury

Joel D. Palmer, Jakarta

With its first ever direct presidential election campaign in full swing, Indonesia is suddenly discovering the marvel of public opinion polling, now an integral part of democratic elections nearly everywhere in the world. Hardly a day goes by without news of yet another poll predicting the outcome of the five-way race that will culminate on Election Day, July 5.

However, while these polls may provide plenty of entertaining diversion from the serious business of choosing a leader, there is a real question as to how accurate they really are.

The recent election in India is a case in point. As the Congress Party took the reins of power, public opinion pollsters were still busy wiping the figurative egg from their embarrassed faces.

According to pre-election polls, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his ruling BJP were expected to be shoo-ins for another term in office. But Indian voters proved to be impervious to the pollsters' conclusions, choosing instead the opposition Congress Party of Sonia Gandhi by a considerable margin.

Does this colossal failure send a signal that there is an inherent flaw in public opinion polls, rendering them unreliable as predictors of winning candidates? Not necessarily, but it does send the message of "buyer beware" when it comes the believability of polls and highlights the need to examine the methodology used by pollsters before subscribing to their results.

While a telephone poll might be effective in the US, where telephone penetration is nearly 100 percent, it is of questionable value in countries with less complete telephone coverage. This is especially true in countries like India (and Indonesia) where a sizable share of the large population lives without access to the amenities of modern technology, like telephones, the Internet or even television. With much of modern polling depending on electronic contact, these people are apt to be left out of the equation.

The problem in India was that the pollsters apparently neglected to ask the over 300 million Indians living on less than a dollar a day what they thought of the BJP's India Shining, a government propaganda campaign aimed at extolling the country's economic growth figures, while failing to deliver the poor from their miserable existence.

These forgotten voters, mainly subsistence-level farmers, who make up nearly one-third of the country's population, apparently weren't sufficiently represented in the pollsters' samplings. The result, according to analysts, was an overwhelming, unpredicted rejection of the BJP by this disenchanted voting block.

It is just such intangible factors that can skew the results of a poll and result in an embarrassing fiasco for pollsters. And, Indonesia, with its far flung regions, diverse ethnicity, and decidedly non- homogeneous, unpredictable mass, the margin for such error is enormous.

There are no identifiable voting blocks like, for example in America, with its urban, suburban, working class, Afro-American, Hispanic, Northern, Southern segments that often vote as blocks and can be reasonably predicted through careful sampling.

In fact, the results of the recent legislative elections, in which no single party dominated, prove the degree of diversity amongst the Indonesian voting populace. That is why pollsters in Indonesia have to take exceptional care in deciding on their sampling and, if possible, rely mainly on face-to-face interviews in lieu of telephone contacts, which can only survey a certain segment of the population.

Unfortunately, almost none of the local polling firms do this; they mainly rely on telephone polling, which, while far cheaper than face-to-face polls, at best gives an indication of how the "haves" will vote and ignores the 70 percent of the economic underclass that has no access to telephones.

Most troubling are the SMS polls run by nearly all of the local TV stations. On any given night the results of these polls are ballyhooed on one station or another as if they were true readings of the public pulse.

The obvious flaw is that these polls only survey the small minority of the population with cell phones and can be easily manipulated by political parties that urge members to vote a multitude of times.

While these types of polls are amusing and entertaining, they are anything but scientific, a fact that the various TV stations neglect to tell their viewers, many of whom apparently see the results as indicative of actual political trends.

The greatest danger lies in the possibility of a "wag the dog" effect of these polls, wherein fence-sitting voters, overwhelmed by the predicted victory of one candidate or another, jump on the "winning" bandwagon to avoid casting their vote for a "loser". This creates a situation where the opinion pollsters, rather than measuring public sentiment, actually influence it.

Most of the reputable polls to date have shown the front runners in the Indonesian presidential sweepstakes to be Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Amien Rais. While one has no reason to doubt these results, it would be well to remember that both of these candidates appeal primarily to educated, urban voters whose decisions will probably be based on intellectual considerations.

At the same time, incumbent Megawati Soekarnoputri and the Golkar candidate Wiranto have generally shown poorly in the polls to date. But history, culture and common sense tell us that when Indonesian voters go to the polls the driving force will be more visceral than cerebral.

President Megawati's appeal to kampung voters who prefer the status quo to change and the powerful Golkar machine behind Wiranto will likely improve their numbers considerably when the real votes are finally counted.

Opinion polling is certainly a legitimate instrument in political campaigning, but can be a very imperfect science when a one-size-fits-all approach is taken.

Those opinion polls that ignore the poor, the unemployed and the isolated as well as disregarding cultural and historical factors are exercises in deception and are likely to backfire. In the end the only poll that really counts is the one where voters go in the booth and punch their ballot.

The writer is Technical Advisor of PT Moores Rowland Indonesia. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily the views of PT Moores Rowland Indonesia.