Inquirer Editorial

Editorial : Polling madness

Inquirer News Service

FORMER PRESIDENT Fidel V. Ramos advised President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to look closely at the results of scientific surveys so she would know the sentiments of the people and improve her leadership. Ramos said scientific surveys serve as "a very accurate guide" of public opinion, but he didn't say clearly how the administration is supposed to respond to them.

If the President were to heed the results of the survey, she would have been gone from Malacañang even before the "Hello, Garci" tape scandal broke out. But even after a series of recent surveys showing more and more Filipinos having an unfavorable opinion of the President and the way she is running the government, Malacañang officials continue to say Ms Arroyo will not step down since surveys cannot substitute for an electoral mandate. Instead, the Palace continues to hope that public opinion will be kinder to Ms Arroyo, even if it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how it could be done. The times are hard and it looks like tougher times lie ahead for the Filipinos, with oil prices going through the roof and higher taxes looming in the horizon.

But there are surveys, and surveys. While most recent surveys have focused on the approval (or disapproval) ratings of the President as well as how the scandal that has been rocking her presidency ought to be resolved, there have been a few that seem to be of very little value or significance.

One was the mid-May survey of the Social Weather Stations (SWS) poll group on Charter change. The survey of 1,200 people nationwide showed that 70 percent didn't find anything in the present Constitution that needed to be changed. But the same survey found 73 percent of the respondents admitting that they had little or almost no knowledge of the Constitution. The only useful conclusion one can reach from such a survey is that Filipinos do not know their Constitution. But to cite the survey findings as an argument against Charter change would be a non sequitur. When people oppose something they don't even know, all they are saying is that they have a fear of the unknown. It is hard to say who is more foolish: the people who judge things they don't know or those who ask them to do so.

Such silly poll-taking apparently is not a monopoly of the SWS. The Pulse Asia poll group produced something very similar shortly before the President's State of the Nation Address last July 25. In its survey, done from July 2 to 14, Pulse Asia asked 1,200 respondents to rate, on a scale from 0 to 10, the incumbent president and her predecessors, starting from Ferdinand Marcos to Joseph Estrada, according to six criteria of good governance. Marcos topped the poll with a rating of 7, while Ms Arroyo trailed everyone else with a median rating of 4, which meant that half of those surveyed, gave her that rating or even lower.

Again it should be asked how relevant are such findings when very few people have a clear recollection of the Marcos martial law regime. Marcos' 20-year rule ended almost 20 years ago. Filipinos 35 years old and below, who make up a large portion of the total population, hardly know anything about martial law (that's how poorly we have educated our youth on history). So how could this particular segment of the sample population be expected to make sound judgments on the five different administrations? Is it fair to ask a person who has tasted only Coke all of his life to compare it with Pepsi? And can he be expected to give a meaningful answer?

Obviously, the Arroyo administration fared very poorly in comparison with its predecessors, based on the survey findings. But what was the basis for the favorable verdict given to Marcos, especially by those who knew little more than that he was a past president? If Pulse Asia told us that the survey showed that familiarity breeds contempt in the case of Ms Arroyo and that absence makes the heart grow fonder in the case of Marcos, it might have brought us closer to the truth.

These efforts of our pollsters are truly pathetic. Like politicians aiming for a bombshell or the media on the lookout for a scoop, they seem to work at breakneck speed to conduct surveys, release the results and generally compete with the politicians and the media for the public spotlight. The trouble is that the relevance and import of some of their surveys have become more dubious, more suspect and even trivial.