One of the minor annoyances of the United States election was how unreliable the polls turned out to be, particularly in some key swing states. Unsurprising, but still annoying for those hoping for a massive repudiation of the Trump presidency. In the large scheme of affairs the failure of the polls to predict is insignificant, but it does raise interesting questions about its implications for public life in the United States and in Australia.
One of the many reasons given for the mismatch between the polls and the election result had to do with the selection of people who were polled. It was argued that of the people contacted, five out of six either did not answer the call or refused to disclose their voting intentions. This meant that an apparently random group was in fact selective. It represented the minority of people who cooperate with pollsters. If the failure to respond indicates people’s aversion to polling and not merely the pollsters’ inability to contact them, it may also make us question the honesty of those who did respond.
That such a high proportion of people failed to respond to pollsters and their electronic simulacra suggests widespread lack of trust in the value of political polls and a reluctance to participate in them. It may also suggest a more pervasive lack of trust in the political process itself and the perception that it serves only the interests of those who control it, whether these be characterised as the 'Washington Swamp' or as opportunistic populists. People may not see the polls as dispassionate enquiries into truth but as instruments that serve those who commission them. Those who are polled are also used as means to further someone else’s interests.
There are good grounds for this suspicion. Polling is a competitive business operated for profit. The results of the polls are sold to media companies or to political parties, which then adapt their own rhetoric to fit the polls. The polls themselves can also be used to provide media stories favourable to the interests of those who commission them. Because businesses run for profit run the polls, too, they will also try to cut the costs involved in contacting people. From employing local people they move to distant call centres, and more recently to automated calling in which the human contact between the person called and the pollster is minimal or non-existent. As a result those contacted increasingly judge that they, their opinions, and their time are taken advantage of for someone else’s profit. They refuse to provide information about their intentions as part of a broader policy of not responding to any cold caller.
If this is so, the polling process that is designed to give confidence in forecasting the future may paradoxically lead to an exponential loss of confidence and trust. The media lose trust in polls and cease to commission them. Politicians lose trust in voters because they can’t predict their behaviour. Polling companies lose revenue and the capacity to improve their polling. Ordinary people lose trust both in polls and in the political process itself.
The worm at the heart of this collapse of trust is the assumption that information about people’s choices and human goods may properly be bought and sold in a competitive market, and that its collection may safely be entrusted to profit-seeking companies. When economic imperatives control the collection of information, automated processes will inevitably replace face to face conversation. They are much cheaper. People, however, continue to believe that information about important personal choices may be shared only in a conversational context where trust is built. Treating the collection of information as primarily an economic activity will corrode this necessary trust.
This is part of a wider loss of trust in political process and its actors that takes place when competitive individual economic relationships with minimal government participation are thought to guarantee human welfare. The result is harmful for the economy and alienating for people, as has been shown in the response to the coronavirus. Trust in governments and their leaders initially increased when they gave priority to the health of the community over the economic interests of individuals, while supporting people economically in the initial crisis.
'People, however, continue to believe that information about important personal choices may be shared only in a conversational context where trust is built. Treating the collection of information as primarily an economic activity will corrode this necessary trust.'
At the same time, however, the crisis exposed the harm done by previous policies in which governments cut spending on health and other community necessities by contracting them out to profit-making companies. Decision making was left to managers whose overriding criterion of satisfactory service was economic performance. They increased profits by cutting back on food and other essentials, and by relying on poorly skilled and paid casual workers. The catastrophic results for the elderly and for health workers of this abrogation of responsibility by governments can be seen in the evidence given to the Federal Royal Commission into Aged Care and to the Victorian Inquiry into Hotel Quarantine.
These failures inevitably erode trust in government and in political processes where the major parties agree in allowing economic growth to take priority over human welfare, and in accepting that economic growth is best achieved by a competitive market in which individuals seek their own interests. These assumptions spawn programs in which people with human needs are presented with a range of services and demands, but are not listened to. They feel themselves to be part of a system in which they profited from, but from which they do not profit. The result is that, just as people lose trust in polls, they also lose trust in governments and in public services when they are treated as cogs in a machine that does not serve them.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: 'I voted' stickers (Unsplash)