The governance rating cycle

SWS had two new releases on ratings of governance this week, both based on the first-quarter 2014 Social Weather Survey, fielded last March 27-30. They are the last of the series from that particular survey. Soon, SWS will begin the next cycle of releases based on its new second-quarter survey, fielded in late June. The first report, as usual, will be on public satisfaction with the President.

One new release was in the July 7 issue of BusinessWorld (BW)—which has the right of first printing—under the title, “Satisfaction with Binay rises to ‘excellent’.” It came from the SWS report, “Net satisfaction ratings at +73 for Vice-President Binay, +17 for Senate President Drilon, -1 for Speaker Belmonte, and +4 for Chief Justice Sereno.” The second new release was in BW of July 9, under the title, “Government rating lowest in nearly two years.” It came from the SWS report, “First Quarter 2014 Social Weather Survey: Net satisfaction with National Administration at “good” +45.”

All the original SWS reports are on www.sws.org.ph, and have the tables and charts enabling comparison with past data. Recently, www.bworldonline.com has also been including the tables/charts. They are essential for historical perspective. The rating of a sitting vice president, for instance, is properly compared to the ratings of previous vice presidents, rather than to that of a sitting president, or of any other official for that matter. The survey question used, after all, is about personal satisfaction with a certain person’s performance in a given office.

As a nonpartisan organization, SWS is very careful about the tone of its public releases, eschewing exaggeration, and being consistent with its terms. When rating the quality of governance, SWS has developed its own system of classifying net satisfaction into Excellent for +70 and up, Very good  for +50 to +69, Good for +30 to +49, Moderate for +11 to +29, Neutral for -9 to +9, Poor for -10 to -29, Bad for -30 to -49, Very bad for -50 to -69, or Execrable for -70 or worse.  (The category Neutral recognizes that a single-digit net number is not statistically different from zero, given the sampling error margin.)

These terms are symmetric, with categories of equal, meaningful, size. The practice of “netting” or subtracting the dissatisfied from the satisfied recognizes that there are citizens who are, sincerely, on neither side. SWS uses plain arithmetical symbols, writing +20 and -30 instead of “plus 20” and “minus 30,” which, in my opinion, only dumbs down the readers. Is “twenty minus thirty equals minus ten” easier for Filipinos to understand than 20-30=-10?

The first quarter’s report card.  The second release is, in effect, a report card of the performance of the national administration, as graded by the people, for the first quarter of 2014. The report card has 17 subjects, each graded by its own survey question. The subjects and their grades, using the SWS grading system, are as follows, with net satisfaction scores in parentheses:

Very Good: Providing basic elementary and high school education (+63), Helping victims of disasters (+60), and Helping the poor (+55).

Good: Foreign relations (+44), Promoting the welfare of overseas Filipino workers (+44), Defending the country’s territorial rights (+44), Transparency in government activities (+43), Reconciliation with Muslim rebels (+38), Reconciliation with Communist rebels (+34), and Providing jobs (+30).

Moderate: Fighting terrorism (+27), Fighting crimes (+22), and Eradicating graft and corruption (+14).

Neutral: Ensuring that no family will be hungry (+7), Fighting inflation (+4), and Ensuring that oil firms don’t take advantage of oil prices (-3).

Bad: Resolving the Maguindanao massacre case with justice (-41).

There is also a separate question about satisfaction with the performance of the national administration as a whole.  This got a Good grade (+45). Note that this is the people’s general evaluation, not an average of the grades on the various subjects.

For proper perspective, I recommend viewing the grade in each subject together with all past grades of the said subject, as many years back as the data allow, making use of the SWS charts.  One will see that the quarter-to-quarter ups and downs of the grades during the P-Noy administration are relatively small compared to their radical improvement from the grades of ALL previous administrations, starting with that of Cory Aquino, when regular opinion polling began.

Freedom of interpretation. One may prefer different categories and terms from those adopted by SWS. What matters more is that the survey numbers themselves cannot change; they are already part of empirical history.

As an institution whose very existence depends on prevalence of freedom of speech, SWS keeps an open mind about the various implications people may draw from its data—possibly by tieing it to other information they have. Freedom of speech calls for freedom of interpretation also.  In particular, BW freely uses a headline and lead that may differ from the original SWS release.  SWS only concerns itself with correct citation of its figures.

What I look forward to in the BW reportage are the comments and reactions to the SWS survey findings from the directly concerned personalities, or their spokespersons, and from various analysts. It takes a day or two (sometimes longer, since it only publishes on weekdays) for BW to collect such feedback, from the time it receives an SWS report.

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