The Problems with Polls
The difference between what is popular and what is right
The title of this post comes from that of an essay in the October 17th (2024) issue of The New York Review by Samuel Earle. I’ve long been troubled by the concept of government by plebiscite, and current events have brought the issue into focus.
I am writing this in the shadow of a likely federal government shutdown at the end of the day. Even if this is somehow avoided, we are likely to see a rerun of the scenario (perhaps over and over again) when the New Year arrives. Should a midnight shutdown happen, the fingers of blame will likely be pointed directly at Elon Musk, as made clear yesterday in a comment by John Ganz.
I was amused to see his reference to Perot’s “Electronic Data Systems [EDS, which] sold computing services when a single computer required entire rooms…“
In the 1960s I worked for an insurance company in Connecticut that had been chosen to be the state’s sole processor of claims for the new Medicare program. I helped to create the interface between our company’s software and the programs supplied by EDS.
The insurance company had an unwritten dress code. Men wore a jacket and tie; women wore a dress or a skirt. In those hippie days, I had shoulder-length hair and a full beard. My attire often included a Madras or tweed jacket — sometimes a polyester leisure suit. The EDS employees (always men) were cloned from a military archetype; clean-shaven with close-cropped hair. They all wore dark blue suits, white shirts, and red ties.
The first thing I did each morning upon arriving at my desk was to doff my coat; I would leave it off for the rest of the day. Almost all the other men in my department did the same. Not the EDS guys, though — they never removed their jackets. I’m not sure I ever saw one of them smile. They were serious and capable workers, and despite the lack of camaraderie, we got the job done.
More to the point of the current situation, Ganz quotes Sidney Blumenthal, writing in The New Republic in 1992:
[Perot’s] one big new idea is the abolition of representative democracy. Instant plebiscites--electronic "town halls"--would in effect supplant Congress as the deliberative body. The taxing power, Perot urges, would be removed from Congress and subject to instant polls to advise the executive-exactly the concentration of power the Framers warned against.
Ganz concludes:
While plebiscites might look like direct democracy manifest, they are among autocrats’ favorite tools for ending public deliberation, manufacturing consent, and dismantling republics: both Napoleon I and III made use of them, and, yes, so did Adolf Hitler. But we aren’t supposed to talk about “authoritarianism” or “threats to democracy” anymore. That’s old hat. And so soon might be the United States of America.
The stage is thus set for a longer view of the struggle between authoritarianism (rule by the few) and democracy (rule by the many). We could go back to classic Greek and Roman times for examples, but let’s stick with the creation of the country that Ganz sees as being imperiled. In The Pursuit of Happiness (a book I’ve referenced in previous posts), Jeffrey Rosen points out that the bedrock of our federal government is what is usually referred to as the balance of power assured by a system of checks and balances.
Rosen asserts that the Founders viewed happiness as the outcome, both individually and collectively, when reason is used to control raw passions. They were very much skeptical (even fearful) of the mob rule implied by full democracy. For example, it was not until 1913, with the 17th Amendment, that Senators were elected by popular vote.
Public Opinion
In The New York Review piece mentioned earlier, Earle calls our attention to the beginnings of polling (“pollster” is a word coined in 1939):
[In 1936] pollsters like George Gallup and Elmo Roper predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory, upstaging more old-fashioned election forecasts that he would lose to Alfred Landon. Their innovation was the sample survey—gathering responses from a group of people deemed representative of the entire population…
Ganz has called our attention to the dangers of governing by plebiscite. We have many recent examples of this risk. California’s Proposition 13 was popular because it restrained taxation, but the state became strapped for funds and spending on education and other services suffered. Beyond the pragmatic difficulties of popular ideas having unintended consequences, there is an ethics angle here. Some of the checks and balances built into the US Constitution are intended to protect the rights of minorities.
Just because an idea is popular does not mean it is the right thing to do. Good governance requires weighing many competing interests and trying to strike the right balance. Plebiscites tend to be single-issue “yes or no” items that do not take into account the complexities of public policy.
Earle identifies another flaw:
… the most fundamental problem with polling is that the phenomenon it claims to record—public opinion—has no coherent meaning or existence. The polling industry resolves this conundrum by simply making “public opinion” synonymous with its methods: polls record public opinion; public opinion is what polls record.
There is also some evidence that polling may influence the outcome of its own surveys. Earle provides several examples — here is one:
In an experiment conducted in 1980, people were asked whether they thought “the 1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed: a third gave an opinion, even though the act does not exist.
People answering a survey may be asked questions about subjects for which they have little or no knowledge.
The sociologist Leo Bogart said in 1972, “The first question a pollster should ask is: ‘Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?’” But usually polling companies don’t want to know: adding questions costs time and money, and ideally they want everyone to have an opinion on everything.
It seems that our country has become obsessed with winning elections, rather than with governing. Polling data is sliced into thinner and thinner demographics, tempting politicians to adopt positions that are “popular” with this or that group, instead of focusing on what remedies would do their overall constituencies the most good.
What should we do about all of this? Stay tuned — I’ll let you know when I have an answer. Meanwhile, I’d like to hear your opinion. Maybe I should take a poll…