The sudden and unexpected announcement that the Global Views Monthly Survey Research Center will no longer conduct or accept commissions for polls on elections and political issues — with a presidential election looming — is suspicious and places a dark cloud of conspiracy over the upcoming election.
The move was unexpected because when Global Views released their latest poll that showed that Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was holding a small lead over President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), they said they were planning to increase the frequency of their polling in the run-up to the election.
Those very words were still fresh when the person in charge of the center quietly resigned. The eerie part about all of this is that the polls Global Views has conducted for so long have often shown Tsai doing better than Ma, and the support rates for the two candidates in their polls have often been much closer than polls conducted by other media companies.
The disappearnce of Global View’s polls, coupled with the majority of the remaining polls being favorable to Ma, it will make for a textbook example of Noelle-Neumann’s “spiral of silence” theory — the minority fails to voice their opinion out of fear of reprisal or isolation from the majority. Any need for false polling is eliminated, because the negative polls naturally suppress Tsai’s support and predictions about who would win the election simply add insult to injury.
Closing a polling company to create an aberration should be added to all the upcoming editions of media studies textbooks as a prototypical example of a regressing democracy. Perhaps it is even the byproduct of a meticulously designed media studies experiment.
On one hand the survey program is expanded, enhancing the aberration, while on the other hand, a polling company is closed to suppress differing opinions, maybe even creating a chilling effect throughout the polling industry so that professionals producing opinion polls with differing numbers will have to take unpaid leave or maybe even lose their jobs.
In the short term, the spiral of silence would serve to enhance the strategic voting effect if People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) decides to participate in the presidential election because so many polls show Tsai and Soong’s combined support ratings are far higher than those for Ma. This means the number of people opposed to Ma far exceed the number of his supporters and the tipping point between Soong and Ma is not found in the distance between them in the polls, but rather in whether Tsai can beat Ma. As soon as this news gets out, Ma will be in a precarious situation.
However, the result of heavy manipulation would be the victory predicted by the polls not matching the victory in the actual election results. For example, in the 1948 US presidential election all the polls had the Republican Party candidate Thomas Dewey defeating then-US president Harry Truman and most media headlines referred to Dewey as victor. However, Truman defeated Dewey.
Look at DPP vice presidential candidate Su Jia-chyuan’s (蘇嘉全) narrow loss to Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) by less than 3 percentage points in the special municipality elections in November last year, when media polls predicted that Hu would win by 10 percentage points or more. Simply looking at the numbers, it would seem that Su benefited from the shooting of KMT Central Committee member Sean Lien (連勝文) on the eve of the election.
Whoever is generating spirals of silence will not only hurt society, they are also committing a heinous crime against Taiwanese democracy.
Hsu Yung-ming is a political science professor at Soochow University.
Translated by Kyle Jeffcoat
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