A Cornerstone of Democracy

Report : Richard Moore

Democracy has developed over a tortuous 2500 years, from the early exhortations of Demosthenes to the current day, when freedom of opinion and conscience is so much taken for granted, that many have lost sight of how precious, and indeed vulnerable, this right is.

The forces ranged against these principles are considerable - governments often shroud their activities in secrecy, and dictatorial regimes in the forms of Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and Milisovic, are not so far away in time or distance.

The essential bastions against political corruption and totalitarianism are a free press, and the right to vote in the absence of fear and deceit. Both of these institutions are strongly bolstered by the open and objective expression of political opinion via the mechanism of opinion polls. The obsession with using polls simply to predict the outcome of a forthcoming election is unfortunate and misses the point that it is the understanding and dissemination of public opinion across a much wider range of issues, rather than the very narrow one of voting propensity, that is of great value and insight. We unquestionably live in an "information" age, and perhaps the most important information to be openly available is our collective views on those moral, social, and political dilemmas that affect our lives, and indeed those of future generations.

This objective and balanced expression of opinion is at the heart of the democratic process - polls are conducted amongst samples that are microcosms of the population as a whole. Thus, unlike the cut and thrust of political publicity, lobbying, and "behind the scenes" pressure, where the most strident and belligerent voices tend to be the ones that are heard, a properly conducted opinion poll ensures that all voices are heard equally: young voices and old voices, rich voices and poor voices, Catholic voices and Protestant voices, loud voices and shy voices: all respondents in a poll are counted equally, no more and no less, than all other respondents. The opinion poll is a great "leveller".

It is not the intention to dwell on the technical details of conducting opinion polls, except to say that there are 3 critical ingredients :

• The number of people interviewed (the sample) must be large enough to produce statistically valid data
• The sample must be representative of given populations
• Questions must be relevant, comprehensible, unambiguous, and objective.

Meeting these criteria places great responsibility on both those commissioning opinion polls and those conducting them. The required levels of expertise and integrity are high, and there is a need for strong professional standards: these are currently enshrined in the Market Research Society Code of Conduct, by which members are required to abide and any breach of which can be taken before a professional ethics committee.

One of the criticisms made of opinion polls is that they in some mysterious way "change the result" of a forthcoming election. This muddled thinking is a patronising sophistry, and effectively accuses the electorate of being too stupid to make up their own minds on how to vote in the light of information legitimately presented to them -why should the public at large not be allowed to see and digest information on the views of their fellow voters? Such information is likely to be a lot more objective, considered, and dispassionate than the endless election leaflets and soapbox histrionics of the would-be politicians! Certainly, to constrain opinion polling has about it the sinister smack of censorship and the smothering of public opinion, and we do well to remember that there was and is no such thing as opinion polling under Nazi, Communist, or despotic regimes.

In the Northern Ireland context, the political situation is not only highly complex, but, as we all know, carries a significance far greater than the "Euro v pound" and "tax or not to tax" politics elsewhere in the UK and Ireland: for our part, we have striven to ensure that the voice of the people - all of the people - has been faithfully assessed and registered by opinion research over the past 35 years.