Social Climate
De Venecia’s survey numbers
By Mahar Mangahas
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:30:00 02/09/2008
MANILA, Philippines -- Earlier this week, at a forum at which foreign parliamentarians met people from civil society, a question arose as to why there seemed to be little public outrage at the ouster of House Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr., apparently as an act of Palace revenge for the allegations of corruption by the Speaker’s son in hearings at the Senate.
I offered the group a personal interpretation that most people might not feel so concerned about an internal quarrel within the administration, between a highly unpopular President and a Speaker who, though not equally unpopular, no longer had as much public goodwill as he had in his first time as House leader, under President Fidel Ramos.
The net satisfaction ratings of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo were usually positive over 2001 to mid-2004; but from October 2004 to the present, they have been consistently negative. Those of De Venecia were positive during 2001-2004, but over 2005-2007 they hovered in single-digits, between -8 and +9, or roughly zero. His full 2001-2007 average net satisfaction rate is a mediocre +7.4.
Public satisfaction with De Venecia’s performance as a public official has been regularly surveyed by the poll group Social Weather Stations (SWS) ever since he became Speaker of the House in 1992, under Ramos. The survey ratings of De Venecia in his two separate six-year stints as Speaker are so different as to seem to refer to different people.
In August 1992, among those aware of De Venecia (two out of every three Filipinos, at that time), 50 percent were satisfied and 11 percent were dissatisfied with his performance; others were neutral. Thus his “honeymoon” net rating was +39. In 1992-93, his net ratings were relatively high and stable, between +39 and +42.
In June 1997, De Venecia set the record-high +46 net rating for a Speaker of the House in the SWS surveys, since 1990. His average for the entire Ramos period was +30.8. Thus the people were pleased with him as a Speaker but, unfortunately because of his personal ambition, did not rate him too highly as a potential next president. In December 1997, SWS tested a list of 17 names for president, and then shortened it to 11 names, and then to seven names. In all three lists, De Venecia was only fifth in the order of voters’ preferences, after Joseph Estrada, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, and Renato de Villa.
In the 1998 election, there were 11 candidates (eventually 10, when Imelda Marcos made a late withdrawal) for president. Estrada consistently held a big lead in the race, in five SWS surveys from late January to early May. As of Jan. 16-23, De Venecia’s 11 percent was only good for fourth, behind Esrada’s 28, Lito Osmeña’s 17, and Fred Lim’s 14. De Venecia’s efforts to catch up through mass advertising were more than matched by Estrada -- in a February 1998 survey of voters who had seen media ads on presidential candidates, De Venecia reached only 38 percent, behind Estrada’s and Lim’s joint 56 percent.
By the homestretch of May 2-4, De Venecia had climbed to second in the race, at 15 percent to Estrada’s 33 percent, with 9 percent undecided. The election was on May 11. The SWS/ABS-CBN Broadcasting exit poll, reported on May 12, had Estrada at 39 percent to De Venecia’s 16 percent. The official result, proclaimed on May 28, had Estrada at 40 percent, and De Venecia at 16 percent.
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The popularity of generic drugs. Given the current debate on whether physicians should be legally required to prescribe drugs using generic names only, or should be allowed to cite both generic and brand names, it seems pertinent to disclose now the results of the last two SWS surveys that probed into people’s purchases of generic versus branded drugs.
The SWS surveys of September 2003 and September 2006 were commissioned by the Department of Health to ask whether, in the previous six months, the survey respondents had purchased mostly generic drugs, had purchased mostly branded drugs, had purchased them equally, or had not purchased any drugs at all.
Those who said they bought mostly generics grew from 39 percent in 2003 to 45 percent in 2006, which is significant given the surveys’ error margins of plus/minus 3 percentage points. Those who equally bought generic and branded moved marginally from 18 to 19 percent, and those who bought mostly branded also barely moved, from 28 to 27 percent. The gain in popularity of the generics was accounted for by the drop, from 17 to 10 percent, in those who said they had bought no drugs at all. Thus the gain from promoting generic drugs should be recognized as going beyond merely lowering the cost of medicine, since it includes enabling more of the poor to afford medicine.
As of 2006, generics were preferred by a majority of 51 percent among the very poor or Class E, and by a plurality of 43 percent among the Class D “masa” [masses]. Branded drugs, on the other hand, were preferred by a plurality of 45 percent among the middle-to-upper ABC classes.
In the 2006 survey, 45 percent of Filipinos who purchased some medicine in the last six months called the current cost of medicine either very or somewhat cheap. This does not show significant growth from the 43 percent who gave those answers in 2003. Both figures, however, are much above the 11 percent in 1999 and 7 percent in 2001 who considered medicine cheap, in surveys that asked the same question except that it was applied to everyone in the sample, including those who had not purchased any medicine in the last six months.
SWS will return to the topic of comparing generic and branded drugs in its future survey work for the Department of Health.
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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
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