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Catching Commercial Pollsters
with Hands in the Cookie Jar ~ #26
By Alan F. Kay, PhD
© 2003, (fair use with attribution and copy to authors)
Sep. 18, 2003
A Gallup poll shows 69% of Americans believe the USA Patriot Act is "about right" or does not go "far enough" in restricting people's civil liberties in order to fight terrorism." The question wording characterizes the Act as making it "easier for the federal government to get information on suspected terrorists through court-ordered wiretaps and searches" — language implying that the Act's provisions are benign, fair, and routine.
But wait. A public-interest polling organization (PIPA, the Program on International Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland) in a survey "Americans on terrorism: Two Years After 9/11" asked a series of questions on the Patriot Act the same week as the Gallup poll.
The PIPA poll introduces the Patriot Act as removing "certain limitations on the government's ability to monitor and detain individuals," a fair and balanced statement with no hint of bias, unlike the Gallup introduction. The PIPA poll has these findings:
75% say "have" to the question "Is it your impression that American citizens 'have' or 'have not' been detained by the United States under suspicion of being involved with a terrorist group?"
74% say yes to "If American citizens are detained by the United States under suspicion of being involved with a terrorist group, is it your impression that they have the right to meet with a lawyer in their defense?"
If the preceding question is enlarged to "should have the right," support goes up to 80%.
66% say they are somewhat or very "concerned that removing limitations on the government's ability to monitor and detain individuals may, in some cases, lead the government to go too far." This is roughly the opposite of the Gallup finding.
Gallup is a commercial pollster, aiming to please its client by finding that most people accept restricted civil liberties to fight terrorism. (A good guess is that Gallup's client is in, or a supporter of, the Bush administration.) Why should we trust PIPA, a public-interest pollster, more?
As a matter of full disclosure I must declare that I, along with four other prominent pro-bono pollsters, had a hand in designing questions for Steven Kull, the Principal Investigator for the PIPA survey. Modesty requires me to add that four of Kull's highly regarded people had designed the questionnaire and wrote the analysis. The survey was funded by grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation.
But there is still more to it. I am one of the 11 members of the PIPA Board of Advisors that includes my ATI (Americans Talk Issues) colleague of 15 years, Fred Steeper, Republican pollster for both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush during both their campaigns and their presidencies. When Steeper polls for the president or any other Republican official, he does what commercial pollsters do. He uncovers how to present the policies, regulations, legislation, and actions that his client favors, so that the public in general and the client's constituencies in particular will be most satisfied. When he works on non-profit public-interest surveys, after 15 years of hands-on experience, he knows the objective is to find government actions that most satisfy the general public when the issue and polling experts designing the survey are required to seek and offer response choices from among a wide range of possibilities, representing not only Democrat and Republican favorites, but also any idea that has anything going for it. The choices must be carefully phrased to be clear, fair, accurate, and collectively balanced.
A poll doing all of that, on almost any governance issue, uncovers entirely different public opinion than commercial pollsters find polling on the same issue. Publicly released commercial polls still far outnumber public-interest polls, so that the public seldom gets a glimpse of that great difference.
Whose findings are more reliable? "The Polling Critic," who has used "fair and balanced" to describe public-interest poll questions for years, thus putting the phrase in the public domain, answers, "I disclose, you decide."
| >>> 2.5 The Polling Critic |