Gallup to the rescue. Can Peter Snow bring peace in our time?

Peter Snow: A 21st Century Saviour?

There have been lots of extraordinary things about the elections in Senegal over the last few months. Big protests, vote-inducing bull-burying and rappers with bin bags are definitely amongst them. But the one thing that I’ve been banging on about for ages, that noone seems to want to hear about, due to its fairly nerdy nature, is the lack of opinion polls.

A crap subject for a blog, right? Almost certainly. But I keep thinking this could be important, that there may be some link between the 18 months of in-fighting, political intrigue, occasional violence and the lack of nerdy pollsters drooling over spreadsheets.

Part of this may be nostalgia. In all honesty I miss the daily pie charts telling me exactly what the public thinks on everything from health policy to Strictly, and miss the Peter Snows and Nick Robinsons of this world rubbing their thighs every time the polled public casts its verdict on our political class. And in a weird way I think the voters of Senegal should miss them too.

It’s of course comforting to know what people think without having to talk to them. And it’s pretty useful too - perhaps even essential to peace, democracy and broader civilisation, if that is not too big an assertion for a thoroughly un-researched amateur blog post.

But maybe true nonetheless. Comparing the tension, passion and occasional violence of the daily demonstrations in the run up to the first round of the elections a few weeks ago with the collective sigh of relief as the results were declared, made me wonder why we had to be so stressed out before.

Like a few other countries, Senegal has long banned reporting political opinion polls in the media, originally to prevent their abuse as a way of manipulating the public in the way that historically candidates such as Mugabe and Gbagbo have done so to diminish their opposition. 

But while the risks of bad polls are clear, a lack of polls has some major drawbacks too. While overall engagement in these elections was impressive, my guess is that much of the population went into the voting booth relatively blind about the effectiveness of the choices they had, and without a huge confidence in the process. Analysis was necessarily anecdotal, limited by censorship that keeps information available to the powerful away from the people.

I do wonder, for example, whether so many people would have been putting their bodies on the line in the streets to try and stop President Wade from running if everyone had known that he would probably only get about 35%. Since at least some of the protestors were driven by a fear that he was going to win in the first round, by fair means or foul, my guess is that inhaling tear gas would seem somewhat necessary.

And if opinion polls could give people faith that the ballot box really can bring about change, they might also be able to help deter fraud too. If it's common knowledge that good opinion polls are predicting a 35% vote for the President, it is going to be hard to convince election observers - not to mention the voters themselves - that ballots have not been stuffed if somehow 60% is suddenly achieved.

Whilst creating good, reliable, independent and trusted opinion polls may not be easy in contexts with poor infrastructure, low education and a fluid party system, it might be worth a try if they can provide greater stability and confidence in electoral process, and help voters make more informed choices with greater confidence.

Given that elections can make or break countries under stress, investing in any measures that strengthen these processes has to be given a much greater priority. Opinion polls might be just one minor example of those measures, but an army of nerds to bringing peace in our time and a Nobel Prize for Peter Snow might be more possible than we think.