1. Why do we have opinion polls?

It turns out the word “poll” originally was a synonym for “head.” Polls counted heads at meetings or rallies to gauge popular sentiment, as in the 1870s political rally in Nebraska shown above. Today, we use polls to count heads, too?–?just a little more scientifically than under the old methods. Here at Pew Research Center, polling is the primary way we find out what the public knows, thinks and wants.?

Don’t elections tell us what the public wants?

You might be asking yourself this question or thinking about all the other ways citizens communicate their opinions to officials, including through letters, phone calls, emails, texts, campaign contributions and even protests. All of those are indeed important ways that public opinion gets communicated, but each of them is limited in important ways.?

Elections are very blunt. They don’t tell us why people supported a particular candidate or whether the public agrees with every policy the candidate proposed. And even with a high turnout election like 2020, a third or more of the public typically does not vote. How are their opinions accounted for?

Citizen communications to politicians, as well as more demonstrative activities like protests, can provide clearer guidance about how some people feel on certain topics. But only a minority of the public takes part in such activities, and those who do are?hardly representative?of the broader population. They tend to be more highly educated and more affluent than the average adult. Voters and those who contact public officials also tend to be older.

And one more thing: A lot of polling is conducted about topics other than those directly addressed by government. Elections do not readily answer broader questions about how people see the world – whether they believe in God, trust scientists or worry about misinformation, for example. Polls also ask about things other than opinions, such as financial circumstances, how people use technology and much more (stay tuned for Lesson 3).?

How are opinion polls better?

Rigorous opinion polls can overcome many of these limitations. The basic goal of a good public opinion poll is to give everyone in the population – regardless of their wealth, age, education, race, knowledge of politics or experience with it – an?equal voice?about the issues of the day.?

We use a technique called random sampling to try to accomplish this. If it works properly, the sample we come up with for a survey can be assumed to be representative of the larger population on any question we might be interested in.?

Random sampling matters because it makes sure that some voices aren’t louder than others. Here’s an example: Wealthier people are far more likely than others to donate to candidates running for office, and public officials hear these contributors loud and clear – even though they’re a small and unrepresentative slice of the entire population. But wealthy people are no more likely to be sampled for our polls than anyone else, so their voices don’t drown out the voices of others. (More on random sampling later in the course.)?

What if we didn’t have polls?

Because polls can tell us things that are not available through any other method, they help serve as a check on those in power (and anyone else, for that matter) who might try to claim that they know what “the American people” think or want.??

Without polls, we’d be back to an era of relying on so-called “man on the street” interviews – basically, a reporter going out and interviewing anyone available nearby. Such exercises can be interesting or fun, but they aren’t a reliable way of finding out what a diverse population really thinks.?

Can’t polls do harm??

One criticism sometimes leveled at polls is that they may be affecting the very thing they are trying to measure. In elections, one version of this is that polls promote a bandwagon effect, in which voters see that a candidate is leading in the polls and decide to “get on the bandwagon” and support that candidate.?

Another version is that polls showing one candidate with a comfortable lead may cause some voters to decide not to vote at all, on the logic that they are unlikely to affect the outcome. Neither of these situations is a good thing for a healthy democratic process!?

Some countries have banned the publication of polls close to Election Day because of such concerns. But the evidence for these kinds of effects is mixed and complicated. And pollsters argue that polling data – whether in elections or just when issues are being debated – is just another source of information that people have a right to see and incorporate into their decision-making. Having a realistic view of what other people think might even turn down the heat on partisan polarization.?

Extra credit

Want to learn even more about the world of survey research? Take a look at some of the resources below from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the leading?association of public opinion and survey research professionals in the U.S.?

• Code of Ethics?
• Best Practices for Survey Research?
• Condemned Survey Practices?