Johann Hari in today’s Independent:
“ban opinion polls during the election campaign. Great slabs of election coverage are dominated by the horse-race: look at this Mori poll! Have you seen this Harris? People know the result of the election in advance — so they don't bother to vote. In France, they stamped this out by banning polls in the run-up to voting. It forces the media to cover the issues, and it injects suspense. Their turn-out was almost double ours”
The only argument I can think of against this idea is a rather weak libertarian one — it’s no business of the state what newspapers and broadcasters do and if they want to poll so be it. That argument needs to be stacked against the well-understood pernicious impact polling can have on turn-out and political engagement. Banning them wouldn’t be unfair to any particular party, it would (as Johann says) force the media to address issues rather than numbers and would partially negate the human tendency to ‘back a winner’ — something that might horrify us political geeks but is a factor in many peoples approach to politics.
What’s more it wouldn’t really dent the activity of polling companies — most campaigns are officially 6/8 weeks but the likely poll date is normally well known some months before that and the nature of polling in that period would probably adjust to reflect the period of abstinence coming up.
Feels like a no-brainer to me....
Comments
Mark Pack / August 18 2008 6:59pm
Well, here are some reasons against banning polls:
a. How do you actually differentiate between legitimate canvassing and polling? In practice, you can't ban polling, you can only ban the publication of polls. And having polls but not letting them be published is fundamentally elitist. Having opinion polls published with the full details available to all is preferable to the alternative: whispered leaking of secret information that lets the favoured few in on the information and forces the rest of us to put up with rumour and misinformation.
b. Freedom of speech. Far from being a "weak libertarian" point, this is a mainstream small-l liberal point: why should the state ban me from gathering the information I want to know?
c. Yes, people do make decisions how to vote based on polls. You might not like it, but that's there choice. It's know as democracy: the people get to choose the criteria they use for deciding how to vote. Who are you or I to legislate to force them to only use the criteria that you or I think are right?