With local elections to take place next month, opinion polls are being published by Chinese-language media on a daily basis, but voters should remember that not all polls are created equal.
Public opinion polls and surveys are often useful to policymakers as indicators of public preferences, and voting polls are commonly commissioned by candidates and the media during election campaigns to understand voter intentions and to make predictions.
It can be confusing to the public when there are drastic discrepancies among the results of surveys published by different pollsters from around the same time, especially when they seem to have asked similar questions among voters of the same constituencies. This can be seen in the different poll results of voters’ preferences on three major Taipei mayoral candidates published in the past few days.
A high-quality poll or survey should have good probability sampling, meaning that every member of a target demographic has an equal chance of being selected, and for non-probability samples, pollsters should apply adjustment weights to better represent the population.
However, some media outlets amplify the results of random self-selecting online surveys with low statistical significance. For example, more than one outlet cited the results of a “poll” that randomly quizzed 38 pedestrians during a 90-minute live YouTube broadcast, which was taken to represent voting preferences in the Taoyuan mayoral election.
Other outlets cite the results of one-question polls on political issues and voting intentions, conducted by popular Web sites that collect the voluntary daily responses of users with registered accounts. These often have large sample sizes, but without weighting systems are afflicted by self-selection biases.
They also include simple survey results published by politicians or Internet influencers through social media, but do not include sampling methods. A city councilor on Thursday published the result of a voting intention poll in the Taoyuan mayoral election, claiming it to have been crowdfunded and conducted by a “credible pollster,” without revealing the pollster or sampling method.
An online Chinese-language outlet recently published several of its own online voter surveys on mayoral candidates, and although it was relatively transparent about its sampling method — revealing sampling dates and stratified sampling from its database of registered readers to send questionnaires through text messages — academics still said the polls could fall foul of self-selection bias.
Among six of its polls, about 1,000 responses were collected from text messages sent to 45,000 to 67,000 targeted respondents for each poll. The low response rate raised the question of whether the results can represent the city’s demographics, and it also failed to explain how the user database was constructed and sampled.
Fewer people respond to traditional telephone surveys, and online open-access surveys are relatively easy to generate, so it could be challenging for pollsters to carefully create high-quality and representative online polls. However, it can also be difficult for the public to distinguish between representative and poorly constructed polls.
Some experts have suggested that people can rely more on pollsters that have better reputations and regularly publish their findings, survey procedures and questions, as they are open to public scrutiny, rather than those that are not transparent and only release findings before elections. People should compare the results from several polls on similar issues conducted around the same time, rather than focusing on a single poll or surveys by one particular pollster.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the new year dawns, Taiwan faces a range of external uncertainties that could impact the safety and prosperity of its people and reverberate in its politics. Here are a few key questions that could spill over into Taiwan in the year ahead. WILL THE AI BUBBLE POP? The global AI boom supported Taiwan’s significant economic expansion in 2025. Taiwan’s economy grew over 7 percent and set records for exports, imports, and trade surplus. There is a brewing debate among investors about whether the AI boom will carry forward into 2026. Skeptics warn that AI-led global equity markets are overvalued and overleveraged
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Monday announced that she would dissolve parliament on Friday. Although the snap election on Feb. 8 might appear to be a domestic affair, it would have real implications for Taiwan and regional security. Whether the Takaichi-led coalition can advance a stronger security policy lies in not just gaining enough seats in parliament to pass legislation, but also in a public mandate to push forward reforms to upgrade the Japanese military. As one of Taiwan’s closest neighbors, a boost in Japan’s defense capabilities would serve as a strong deterrent to China in acting unilaterally in the
RSS