News Release

May 29, 2001

Politicians should ignore public opinion polls, study says
Polling offers no reliable guide to policymaking

WASHINGTON-For almost any public policy issue, there's an opinion poll commissioned that supposedly determines what the public wants, with the unspoken directive that policymakers should follow "the will of the people." But according to a new study by the Cato Institute, polling is an inherently flawed enterprise that fails to measure the real interests of respondents and offers no informed guidance to policymaking.

In "Why Policymakers Should Ignore Public Opinion Polls," author Robert Weissberg, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, argues that "public opinion polling measures the wishes and preferences of respondents, neither of which reflect the costs or risks associated with a policy." As a result, polls are useless to policymakers who must pay attention to tradeoffs among values, second-best possibilities and unexpected risks. And since "improvements would make the product (poll results) too expensive or too difficult to obtain from weary respondents," policymakers should simply ignore the polls and focus on their own judgment, Weissberg says.

To make an informed choice a policy issue requires an understanding of the policy area as well as information on all possible consequences from a given choice, but polls routinely fail to ensure that respondents are well-versed in either. "Modern polling can give us back only what citizens know the moment the phone rings," notes Weissberg, and most citizens don't have significant background on the nuances of public policy. In the interests of time and money, pollsters tend not to screen out those with deficient knowledge or provide that knowledge to the respondents. "This frugality results in a pervasive dumbing down of the entire enterprise," Weissberg argues, where "hugely complex issues become catch phrases."

And then there is the problem of what constitutes a "public mandate." "The public mandate is not the sum of its individual parts," argues Weissberg. "Collective decisions are rarely derived by mechanically aggregating isolated individual first choices, especially when deals must be struck across multiple policy domains. Differences in priorities, intensities, negotiating skills and other pertinent elements could, conceivably, yield a final outcome that was disagreeable to everyone and yet gained a majority."

"The high priests of public opinion insist that their polls convey legitimate advice about policies and political strategies," says Weissberg. "They are wrong."

"Why Policymakers Should Ignore Public Opinion Polls"