With less than a week remaining until the date to finalize the progressive coalition ticket, public opinion polls are projected to play a critical role in deciding whose name will be on the ballot.

But experts and analysts say public opinion polls may not always be an accurate indicator of people’s opinion nor conducive to the electoral process.

“As the process of democratization and people’s political participation become more active, opinion polls yield greater influence on elections,” said Han Gwee-yong, a head researcher at the Korea Society Opinion Institute, which specializes in the study of public opinion.

“The study of popular opinion has been active since the 1992 presidential election and through (the role it played in) the merger of candidacies in 2002, opinion polls came to exercise abnormally high influence on elections in Korean society.”

In the 2002 presidential election, opinion polls decided the merger between Chung Mong-jun, the businessman-turned politician who gained wide popularity after his role in South Korea’s successful hosting of the 2002 World Cup, and Roh Moo-hyun of the Millennium Democratic Party.

Roh had been trailing Chung in opinion polls. A Gallup poll conducted three days before opinion polls were to be conducted had found that Lee Hoi-chang of the conservative Grand National Party led the three-way race with 31.3 percent, followed by Chung with 30.8 percent, and Roh with 16.8 percent.

Other surveys had found similar results. But three days later, Roh defeated Chung in a hypothetical three-way race, with Roh coming on top with 46.8 percent, followed by Chung with 42.2 percent, and Lee with 32.1 percent.

The surprise surge in opinion polls for Roh may have been due to the question asked in the survey.

“The difference in how the questions are phrased yield significant influence,” said Lee Sang-il, a director at TNS Korea, a polling agency.

At the time, the question of who was the more “proper” candidate to face Lee swayed in favor of Roh, who was the candidate backed by a political party with a long tradition and large support base, while the question of who had more “competitive edge” favored Chung, who had broad appeal among conservatives as the heir to the Hyundai conglomerate and the young for his role in the soccer tournament.

The question that was asked in the final opinion poll was: who do you support between candidate Roh Moo-hyun and candidate Chung Mong-jun as the single candidate who will compete with candidate Lee Hoi-chang of the Grand National Party?

“Although most credible polling agencies announce results that can be trusted, one cannot forget that there exist various differences among the results,” said Lee, the polling director from TNS.

Experts say that there are several phenomena that can potentially impair the credibility of the opinion polls. One such phenomenon is the bandwagon effect, a groupthink trend observed in the behavioral sciences, in which people’s opinion is heavily influenced by what other people think, regardless of their own prior beliefs or opinions.

The bandwagon effect allows a popular trend to attract further support and approval through a snowballing effect ― an absurd horse-riding dance becoming more popular as more and more people watch it on YouTube, for example.

“In a country like Korea where political liquidity is extreme and the Internet allows active exchange of information, when your opinion isn’t that of the majority, you tend to keep silent,” said Kim Hyeong-jun, a professor in politics at Myongji University. “The majority opinion can generate the bandwagon effect.”

In other words, opinion polls may hinder public opinion to the extent that it is altered from where it was when the polls were conducted.

“Opinion polls are about seeing the trend. They merely amount to being the snapshot of the situation,” said Kim. “Instead of engaging in horse-race style reporting, which announces only the results of the opinion polls, (the press) should present in-depth analysis of why such trends have occurred.”
By Samuel Songhoon Lee (songhoon@heraldcorp.com)