Diversity makes it tough to take the nation’s pulse
WITH its scandal-aday politics, SA is a ripe market for political polling, yet the country does not have a polling industry worth talking about. Most democratic countries with a population size similar to SA’s have a dozen or so polling firms and many fringe outfits, all contributing to building a national picture of the opinions and choices of voters. Yet SA has only a handful of polling companies or research firms with a significant polling component.
The most prominent is Ipsos, which formerly traded as Markinor. It produces the most polls on political activity and has the best accuracy rates. Yet polling only accounts for a small percentage of its revenue: its bread-and-butter business is in-depth market research across an array of sectors.
“Our demographic simply doesn’t lend itself to polling,” says Sifiso Falala, founding MD of market research firm Plus94, where polling accounts for less than 1% of revenue.
“It’s because of our diversity, more than our size, and our different types of residential neighbourhoods,” he says.
Mark Molenaar, of TNS SA, says another inhibiting factor is “group influences in rural areas”. He says the apartheid legacy in the structure of society is also a factor, and goes deeper than spatially divided cities.
Because politics was for so long a forbidden topic for many, some people still struggle to talk about it openly or freely — and more importantly, frankly — which led TNS, one of the biggest polling firms in the world, to stop conducting political opinion polls in SA in the 1990s.
“We just couldn’t carry the reputational risk of getting it wrong,” Molenaar says.
Plus94 has also stopped polling on political views, but because of the high cost. Falala says the ideal way to poll is face to face, but that is expensive — there would not be much change from a cost of R1m — and “there are very few clients with that kind of budget”.
Another factor has been the predictability of South African elections. Until recently, there was never much doubt that the African National Congress (ANC) would win most polls. But the ruling party is now looking vulnerable on several fronts going into the August local government elections, which makes opinion polls a “must have” for the main parties. But it is unlikely polls will happen with the frequency they do in the US anytime soon.
Ipsos conducts face-to-face polls particularly well with its national omnibus surveys, which collect the views of a few thousand people around the country in a sample representative of all.
The problem is that it takes six or more weeks to conduct and read the results, which means they are often overtaken by new scandals, rendering them meaningless.