The media love to make a big deal of polls. This would appear to be consistent with Ehrlich’s Law: “People pay way too much attention to things that are easily quantified.” But does this poll really tell us much?
For one thing, the sample was only 1000 people out of the 10 million in this country who can vote. I have some doubts about how much we can assume from so small a sample (~0.01%). (I'd love to see the pollsters publish the details about their sampling methods and confidence levels.)
Apart from the polling itself, the way that the results are presented in the media is worth a closer look. Let's consider the data about how the bad behaviour of union officials is likely to affect support for the ALP. On various TV news programs, the data was reported in a very simplistic manner: 46% of respondents indicated that the union officials' behaviour would not influence their vote, 43% said it would, 11% unsure. On two of those TV programs, this was cast as a bad result for the Government. Really? The 46% whose votes would not change are hardly the voters we should be looking at - they represent the voters who are already polarised on their choice of party. It's the other two categories that are of interest. 43% said it would influence their vote - but in which way? If a large chunk of the 43% are voters who might vote for the ALP but who may not because of the union officials, this is good news for the government, not bad. But of course, no breakdown of the data was given.
A column in the Herald Sun gives a different set of figures (which don't seem to entirely line up with what was appearing on the news programs mentioned above), specifically:
...20 per cent of voters said they were now less inclined to vote Labor because of [union official Joe McDonald's] actions, 9 per cent said they were more inclined to vote for the party, and 67 per cent said they would not be influenced either way...
and the overall interpretation in that column was "voters also said they were largely unconcerned by the bullying actions of union officials".
Again, the columnist is looking at the largest number in the figures and drawing a conclusion from that, but the interesting numbers are the small ones - 20% of the respondents indicated that they would be less inclined to vote Labor. What proportion of those respondents would otherwise vote Labor? How significant is their change in resolve? Could this represent an increase in the proportion of swinging voters who have previously come down on the left side of the political spectrum but who may now be leaning to the right? Again, there is no breakdown and thus no way to answer these questions.
What this does illustrate is the generally poor way that polls and statistical measures are handled by the media. They are interpreted in the most simplistic terms (and some columnists are clearly happy to interpret them in line with their own political leanings). What are the viewing public to make of these statistics and the interpretations doled out by the media?
Mark Twain quipped about "lies, damn lies and statistics", a response to the spurious use of surveys and statistics by the politicians of his day. If Twain were alive today, he'd no doubt use the same line, the difference being that now newspaper columnists would figure more prominently in the list of perpetrators.
But given that news has become like takeaway food, with an emphasis on speedy delivery of something palatable without too much attention to quality, should we be surprised?
