Angeyo H. Kalambuka
5 December 2007
opinion
IF THERE IS A COUNTRY WHERE opinion polls should be banned, it is Kenya. When, as I have done before (DN, October 25), I argue that polls are more a tool for "political engineering" than for "social physics" as Auguste Comte envisaged, I raise real concern: Figures don't lie, but liars can figure.
Finding out what people think is a problem as old as man. After years of working on it, some mandarins discovered a way of going about the task:
"Just ask people - rely on their honesty". Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to use the term "public opinion" in 1744 when he was France's foreign secretary, it was John Graunt's and William Petty's 1660's fanciful ideas of "political arithmetic" that gave rise to polling. Today, polls are to a politician what the stock market is to the financial analyst.
However, to assume that people can be lumped simply into "for" and "against" categories; that statistical methodology can measure opinion as it does births or accidents; and that there is such a thing as an identifiable "opinion" which can accurately be measured, is senseless.
WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS RIGHT: There is no such thing as public opinion, only published opinion. Public opinion is fragmentary, contradictory, volatile, based as much on myth as on reality, and difficult to interpret with certainty. An opinion poll only constitutes a snapshot of many viewpoints held by a segment of the population at a given time.
Kenyan polls are often presented without the necessary background (e.g., how and when the interviews took place, sample size, sponsorship, etc.) to permit a rational assessment of their validity. They are also based on flawed methodology and dubious assumptions.
How are interviewers trained and supervised? How impartial are the pollsters? Do the data generated meet the standards of a scientific survey?
Opinion polls undermine democracy by influencing electoral behaviour. The media attention they receive detract from discussions of "real" issues. The media know this. But they dutifully report them and we consume acres of newsprint and eons of airtime talking about the election outcome, an entirely pointless exercise, since we will all know the answer in a few days.
In a country like Kenya where corruption rules supreme, why give it another impetus? The publication of polls gives an unfair advantage to candidates whose fortunes are seen to be improving.
The so-called "bandwagon" effect assumes that knowledge of a popular "tide" will change voting intentions in favour of the frontrunner.
Polls can also have a "demotivating" effect (when voters abstain from voting out of certainty that their candidate will win); a "motivating" effect (when those who had not intended to vote are persuaded otherwise); a "free-will" effect (when voters cast their ballots to prove the polls wrong); or a negative effect on the "momentum" of a campaign.
We need to guard against two tricks: "seldep" (self-defeating prophecy) and "selfup" (self-fulfilling prophecy) which were responsible for the failures of opinion polls to predict the victories of e.g. Landon over Roosevelt in 1936, and of Dewey over Truman in 1948.
The most notable example of a "seldep" was the unexpected triumph of Edward Heath in the 1970 British elections when the widespread predictions of Heath's defeat led too many Labour voters to not bother to vote.
Everyone considered the outcome of the 1980 presidential election in the US too close to call, yet Ronald Reagan won by a landslide. The 1992 surprise victory of the Conservatives over Labour in Britain is another example. So was the outcome of the Gough Whitlam government's price and wage control in the Australian referendum.
France, South Korea, Mexico and Taiwan ban the publication of opinion polls in the days running up to an election. In France, for example, the media cannot publish polls of voting intention in the week before national voting.
IN KENYA, OPINION POLLS ARE almost valueless because, they hardly tell us anything. Uneducated individuals, be they politicians, journalists or academics, who use polls, not to gauge what people really want, but to ascertain what they believe about politics.
Kenyans, even the educated, vote with their hearts and are not distracted by an interesting but largely academic exercise. Opinion polls only offer urban upper-middle chattering classes yet another topic to gossip about at beer clubs.
Coming clean about polls would mean taking them off the front pages and sticking them where they belong - back in the horoscopes and comic strips.
At the moment, polling has become just another tool used by unscrupulous players. Respondents are pawns easily manipulated by hired pollsters.
Dr Kalambuka teaches physics at the University of Nairobi.
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I think Dr Kalambuka should stick to physics and let interested Kenyans discuss their country's politics and opinion polls in their beer clubs. Opinion polls influence more people to be involved in the country's politics, especially the young and educated. This trend should be appeciated.