Answering a leading question

The classic example of a leading question is: “When did you stop beating your wife?”

If asked of me, I would answer: “Right after she stopped beating me.”

A silly question deserves a silly answer.

The purpose of a serious opinion poll is to learn what the people think, not to tell the people what to think. It’s an exercise of listening to the people, not of speaking to them. The term “the people” refers to the whole society. Studying and teaching opinion polling belongs to schools of mass communications.

Freedom of speech includes both the freedom of survey respondents to answer questions as they please and the freedom of researchers to ask questions as they please. An individual respondent who accepts being interviewed is not obliged to answer every question.

Before an interview begins, the field interviewer assures the respondent that the whole exercise is voluntary and confidential, including the respondent’s identity. A true pollster keeps the anonymity of a respondent like a secret of the confessional.

A respondent’s recompense for participating in an opinion poll is the psychic satisfaction of contributing to democracy and social science. Many of the participants in polls of Social Weather Stations feel so lucky at being randomly chosen for the sample, and are pleased to share their views with us. (We know this because the interview ends with their choosing from several emojis to describe the experience.)

An individual pollster is free to ask questions only about certain topics, and not about other topics. A democratic society has not only many potential respondents but also many potential pollsters. Those who criticize a given poll for allegedly using leading questions should run their own polls, with their own questions, and show us what difference it makes.

Competition in polling is a sign of a working democracy. Authoritarian governments try to control their people and their pollsters. Survey research organizations in China and Russia are very closely watched.

Most opinion poll questions, for the sake of cost-efficiency, are multiple-choice-type, and so the answers are part of the question. Any backgrounder to a question—indeed, anything told or shown to the respondent—is also part of the question. It’s clearer to call the whole thing a “questionnaire-item,” lest the term “question” be interpreted as only the sentence ending in a question mark.

(A poll ordinarily has many questions to ask, and so the entire sequence of questionnaire-items heard or seen by a respondent previous to a certain item may also influence the respondent’s answers. The standard way to nullify potential sequence-bias is to ask the items in random order—by putting questionnaire-items on separate cards, and then shuffling the cards for each specific respondent before implementing the items.)

Public opinion about proposed amendments to the Constitution is fair game for research. Since such amendments have to be ratified by the full electorate, it is sensible, both for proponents and opponents, to gauge what the people think of them. Just like electoral candidates, the individual amendments deserve analysis according to their SWOT—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Such analysis should improve the amendment proposals.

Opinion poll findings will be favorable for some amendments, and unfavorable for others. Some partisans will be encouraged; others will be discouraged. Those responsible for polls should be free to publicize them, or not, as they wish; happily, there is no monopoly on polling. I think polls have no bandwagon effect to support amendments, since they have hardly any such effect on supporting electoral candidates.

Personally, I would like to see proposed amendments examined one by one and put up for ratification individually, with each one passing or failing with the public on its own merit. It would be terrible for a bad amendment to be lumped with good ones, and then for an entire group of amendments to be offered as all-or-nothing to the voters; that would be deceptive and cowardly.

I’m also intrigued by some quarters’ insistence on ratification by 2025, as though in preparation for the presidential elections of 2028. Is there any plan to sneak in some amendment of the constitutional term limits?

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Contact: mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.