Survey Halloween time

FOR SURVEY researchers, the homestretch of an election campaign is like Halloween time: Weird things happen.

Fakery happens. On April 26, we learned of the appearance of a one-page sheet of voter preferences for mayor, vice mayor and councilors of Dumaguete City—under a joint letterhead of Pulse Asia and Social Weather Stations, over a footer of Bilang Pilipino 2016, complete with logos—allegedly from a “Social Weather Report” of an April 7-23 local survey. It claimed to be based on a survey with 5,000 registered voters as respondents.

The address given on the sheet is General Maxilom Avenue, Cebu City. It is signed by a Jocelyn S. Panganiban, “branch manager for Cebu.” Our informant was a friend from Holy Name University of Tagbilaran, where SWS has provided training in survey research. SWS is issuing its usual warnings.

There is anonymous texting about an alleged SWS survey of vote preferences as of April 20-23—i.e., from last Wednesday to Saturday—but no such SWS survey exists. The public should rely on www.sws.org.ph, on which official SWS releases to the media will be posted. In case a sponsor decides to release his/her own confidential survey, the SWS page will follow through with the sponsor’s contact information.

Take careful note of the dates of survey fieldwork. Voting attitudes can definitely change over time. Otherwise, why should election campaigners work at all?

In early 1987, with 24 senatorial seats at stake in the coming May elections, the SWS-Ateneo de Manila University team, with funds for only one survey round per semester, mulled over whether to conduct the survey just before the elections, or much earlier, for the benefit of political campaigners.

It was decided to do the survey in March. The survey found an exact 12-12 tie between the candidates of President Cory Aquino and the other candidates. Alarmed, Paul Aquino, Cory’s campaign manager, told his team: “This means we cannot sleep any more!”

By dint of the persuasive power of “Cory magic” during the campaign, the final score was 22-2, with only Joseph Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile as the nonadministration survivors. After the elections, pundits sneered at the SWS-Ateneo survey for “predicting” that only half of Cory’s candidates would win.

Don’t fall for the “mind-conditioning” line. If it were true that Filipino voters have a herd mentality, and will always vote for the survey leader, then survey standings would never change. The margin of the leader would just get larger and larger. How then was it possible, in the 2010 vice-presidential race, for Jojo Binay to move from third place in March and overtake Loren Legarda and Mar Roxas by Election Day in May?

Don’t clutch at sophomoric straws. Some people fault the SWS practice of allotting equal samples of respondents to Metro Manila, the rest of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, on the ground that the four areas have unequal numbers of voters. They misunderstand the difference between the allocation of sample size by area—which is done to equalize the error margin per area—and the proper aggregation of areas by using the Commission on Elections’ number of voters per area as weights.

Don’t think that survey findings can be bought. The findings will always be good news for some parties and bad news for others. If all surveys are done confidentially, then only the sponsors with favorable results will release them. Election surveys done as a public service should have no one who can control the release of the findings. If SWS cannot find nonpartisan media sponsors who will publish whatever the findings are, it will absorb the cost itself.

What’s the pay-off for publishing election surveys? For George Gallup Sr., survey pioneer, the payoff from successful election prediction was enhancement of the credibility of his consumer research, his bread-and-butter occupation.

Social Weather Stations has its own bread-and-butter motive. The SWS payoff is for its surveys of the people’s reports about their own poverty, their own hunger, their own satisfaction with governance and democracy, etc. to be believed. And we know—based on surveys, too—that the Filipino people appreciate surveys. Filipinos like surveys, and wish that the government would heed them more.

SWS generates statistics for democratic discourse. For SWS, generating and publicizing alternative statistics helps to put its subject matter higher on the agenda of public and private policymakers. SWS data on regular topics like hunger, poverty and governance and on special topics such as corruption, the legal profession, domestic violence, and disadvantaged groups are consciously meant as Statistics for Advocacy, rather than for mere academic study.

Democratic discourse, in the modern world, has particular need for scientific opinion polling during times of crisis. If polling becomes controversial, it is part of the trade. It does not create controversies, but simply lets the light of day shine on them, in keeping with the final verse of the SWS Hymn:

Yan ang aming hangarin
Demokrasya’y pagtibayin.
Instrumento ng masa
Sa kanilang karaingan
SWS ay tinatag
Layon nitong magampanan
Na ang baya’y magising sa katotohanan

which means

It is our goal
To strengthen democracy.
A means for the masses
To air their needs,
SWS was set up
To perform its task
Of awakening the nation to the truth.
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Contact mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.