Have surveys disrupted elections?
In standing up to the slings and arrows of politicians outraged, dismayed, annoyed, or irritated by opinion polls, I think no other research institution in the Philippines has more experience than Social Weather Stations (SWS), established in 1985 and marking its 40th birthday this year. I write this as SWS chair emeritus, since in 2021 I was succeeded as SWS president/CEO by Linda Luz Bacungan Guerrero, an SWS veteran of 35+ years. I am welcome to SWS board meetings, but I do not vote or actually chair.
In our time, the Supreme Court (SC) has issued two major rulings that support opinion polling, by declaring that (1) exit polls and (2) preelection polls are protected by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and expression. One is GR No. 133486 (ABS-CBN v. Comelec) of Jan. 28, 2000; the other is GR No. 147571 (SWS v. Comelec) of May 5, 2001. The backgrounds of the cases and rationales for the rulings are separate chapters in books by former chief justice A. V. Panganiban, “Transparency, Unanimity and Diversity” and “A Centenary of Justice” (Supreme Court Press, 2000 and 2001).
The SC observed that the ABS-CBN exit polls of 1992, 1995, and 1998 (which were done by SWS) did not in fact disrupt the elections of those years. In the second case, it said, “To sustain the ban on survey results would sanction the censorship of all speaking by candidates in an election on the ground that the usual bombasts and hyperbolic claims made during the campaign can confuse the voters and thus debase the electoral process.”
Comelec’s new Resolution 11117 (Feb. 19, 2025) has mistaken premises. It says that Comelec “recognizes the significant influence of surveys in shaping voter preferences.” But, as a matter of fact, such influence is minimal.
In May 2013, referring to the upcoming senatorial election, SWS’ national survey found 64 percent not aware of election survey news; of those aware, 25 percentage points said the news did not affect their probable vote; 4 percent said they would shift to stronger candidates (a bandwagon effect); 3 percent said they would shift to weaker candidates (an underdog effect); and 5 percent said they would shift to some stronger and some weaker candidates (part bandwagon, part underdog). (“SWS May 2-3, 2013 Pre-Election Survey: Election surveys are considered Good by 74%; their effect on voting plans is tiny,” www.sws.org.ph, posted on May 11, 2013. https://tinyurl.com/4wcr94nv)
In June 2016, soon after the election, 84 percent said election surveys had no effect on their vote, 5 percent said that they shifted to stronger candidates, 3 percent said they shifted to weaker candidates, and 8 percent said they shifted both to some favorites and to some underdogs. (Source: “Do polls influence elections?” by Leo S. Laroza of SWS, presented at the Asian Conference for Political Communication, Singapore, 9/5/2017 https://tinyurl.com/mtt4h9mw)
SWS has repeated these election probes many times, and always found that Filipino voters are hardly influenced by surveys. All SWS raw data are archived, to enable any bona fide social scientist to recompute the numbers and to study them more thoroughly.
Therefore, as a matter of empirical fact, surveys have not disrupted elections. I do not see when, if ever, they may have the capacity to do so. They are a means of learning what our fellow Filipinos think, not of pushing any of us to think in a particular way. The great majority of us Filipinos consider opinion polling a Good Thing, not a Bad One—even if very few of us understand why a sample of only about 1,000 voters could be accurate.
If Comelec is not sufficiently familiar with such research, so closely related to its work, we would be pleased to make special presentations for it.
The Code of Professional Ethics of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) already includes all the guidelines needed for fair and scientific reporting of survey results. The requirements of transparency of the survey sponsor, the wording of questions, sample size, error margins, and so on and so forth, are already there. (I think they are listed in the Fair Election Act, precisely because I was the one who pointed them out to some senators when it was being discussed.) The financial cost of a survey is NOT required for disclosure.
SWS has always been using the WAPOR guidelines. The Marketing and Opinion Research Society of the Philippines, of which I was president in the early 1990s, follows them too. I first joined WAPOR in 1993, and was on its board a few times. SWS president Linda Guerrero happens to be the 2024-2025 president of the Asia and Pacific Chapter of WAPOR.
I humbly maintain that any requirement of official permission before conducting an opinion poll—about elections or any other topic—constitutes prior restraint, and is offensive to the right of freedom of expression.
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Contact: mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.
