Opinion polls: Often misused but essential tool for democracy

As we hurtle down to the 2022 presidential election, be prepared to be inundated with all sorts of opinion polls, from the interesting to the preposterous.

Indeed, if you took a public opinion poll about polls, odds are that a majority would offer some rather unfavourable views of pollsters and the uses to which their work is put. Yet if you asked whether politicians, business leaders, and journalists should pay attention to the people’s voices, almost everyone would say yes. And if you then asked whether polls are, at least, one tool through which the wishes of the people can be discerned, a reluctant majority would probably say yes to that too.

Several conundrums of public opinion polling are enfolded in this hypothetical tale. People of all kinds, activists and ordinary citizens alike, regularly cite polls, especially those that find them in the majority. But people are deeply sceptical of polls, especially when opinion moves in the “wrong” direction.

This has been observed time and again in our politics. When polls favour a leader, his supporters mount the rostrum and dance themselves lame, while their opponents deride the poll as cooked, and the pollster as having been “bought”. Months on, when the same pollster releases a poll that does not favour the previous “winner”, all hell is let loose in that camp, with the poll results dismissed as useless and meaningless.

Why so? Some of their doubts are about pollsters’ methods. Do they ask the right questions? Are they manipulating the wording of questions to get the responses they want? And whom did they interview? Some of the doubts are wrapped up in a mistrust of the political parties, marketers, and media giants that pay for the polls.

The imaginary example also shows that it matters greatly how the pollsters ask their questions. Sometimes, respondents offer opinions on subjects about which they have not thought much and do not care at all. People sometimes answer pollsters’ questions just to be polite—because they figure they probably ought to have an opinion. That gives pollsters a lot of running room to “manufacture” opinion, especially on issues of narrow rather than wide concern.

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Even when people have strong views, a single polling question rarely captures those views well. Human beings are complicated and so are their opinions. Using the findings of our example, enemies of polls could cite the public’s doubts to “prove” that the public is against polls. Friends of polls could note that the public, however grudgingly, agrees that polls are one tool for gauging public opinion and that leaders should consult public opinion. They could thus “prove” that the public embraces polls. Both ways of looking at the findings would use reality to distort reality.

So, how do polls work? What can they teach us about public opinion? What role does and should public opinion play in our democracy? In this article, I bring a straightforward bias in favour of polling, shaped, in part, by my experiences as a political sociologist and governance lecturer previously at The Ethiopian Civil Service University and at Pwani University.

I share a belief that the study of what citizens think about politics and policy is a genuine contribution to democracy. It’s especially important in democracies whose politicians claim their mandates from the people and regularly insist that they represent the views and interests of the people. To ask the people, with regularity, for their own thoughts is both useful and a check on the claims of those in power.

But it is precisely because of my respect for polling that I am disturbed by many things done in its name. When interest groups commission pollsters to ask leading questions to gather “scientific” proof that the public agrees with whatever political choice they have made, they demean polling and mislead the public.

When analysts, sometimes innocently, use poll numbers as a definitive guide to public opinion even on issues to which most people have given little thought, they are writing fiction more than citing fact. When political consultants use information gathered through polling and focus groups to camouflage their clients’ controversial policies with soothing, symbol-laden, and misleading rhetoric, they frustrate democratic deliberation.

Public opinion is an elusive commodity. Attempts to measure it, as Samuel Popkin argues in The Reasoning Voter, will inevitably reveal inconsistency and change. These problems arise, Popkin insists, not because the public is insufficiently educated, informed, or motivated. Instead, ambivalence is simply an immutable fact of life.

As a consequence, citizens use information shortcuts when making decisions in the political arena, with new and personal information driving out the old and impersonal. With the public lacking fixed preferences on many issues, political actors have ample incentive to supply those shortcuts in ways that might broaden support for themselves and the policies they champion.

Polling is a tool, not a principle. In this article I seek neither to praise nor to bury polling. I do, however, acknowledge how important it has become in our democracy.

I stress Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” rule. And I urge Kenyans to remember the great difference between the idea that the people should rule and the use of polls to determine public policy or manipulate the people’s will.

I am sure the people agree with me. If you doubt that, just take a poll!

- Edwin Wanjawa teaches at Pwani University