Governing by Spin, Blag, & Blog
5) Policymakers
Johnny Heald, MD of the Opinion Research Business, seemed to call into question what is the point of providing politicians and governments with information about what constituents think, if they are only going to proceed with their own agendas anyway.
Heald points out that the Mayor of London conducts massive amounts of quantitative research, large-scale surveys, and consultation projects not possible before. Nevertheless, he said: “One of the issues is that people do have agendas, and we’ve seen ourselves through first hand experience, government departments, who undertake research because they have to undertake research…and then they choose to spin the research to justify their argument.”
He provided an example of a Local Authority that wanted to subcontract all their housing to something called an Almo. “We asked in a big survey: ‘Were they (citizens) familiar with it and what did they think of it?’ Half the people were not familiar with it, and of the remaining 50 per cent, only about 20 per cent were in favour of it. We send in a report, they re-jig it, they forget about the 50 per cent that had not heard of it. They take out the people who were neither favourable nor unfavourable, and they came up with a finding that says 70 percent of people are in favour of the Almo. They spin it.”
Spangenberg made conclusive comments about the morning’s event, tying together the five points made and explored throughout the programme. He affirmed that the discussion panel absolutely served its objective. “We are still learning and we continue to learn. Why are we doing this at ESOMAR? We have, of course, this intermediary role between organisations, institutions and the audience. ESOMAR has thousands of researchers working very hard, counting, measuring, and creating an abundance of information for all of us. Still, we have to learn to ask the right questions and to assume them into our methodologies.”
He noted that ESOMAR does not wait to see how changes go. Rather, ESOMAR tries to reach out and we organise discussion groups worldwide that reveal facts, ideas and thoughts to impart to its members. He shared some political insights from his home country, the Netherlands. He spoke about how the new government is going directly to the people in person for its “listening” exercises, not relying on technology. This fitted squarely with one of Boyd’s comments, during the discussion part of the programme, that the virtual world cannot replace the voice and needs of people in the real world.
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