‘Polls set the tone for financing election campaigns’: Figures & Concepts

In mid-August, César Caballero, manager of Cifras & Conceptos, will launch his book entitled “El poder de las encuestas” (The Power of Surveys), published by Planeta. There he reflects on his role in electoral processes. Portafolio spoke with him about the subject.

What is the title of the book?

The Power of Polls and has a subtitle that is “And its impact on the Colombian electoral process.” It is the version of academic and scientific dissemination that Planeta makes of an academic text that allowed me to obtain my doctorate at the Universidad Javeriana last year. What I wanted to do was a self-critical and reflective exercise on the profession that I have been practicing in recent years.

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What came out of that reflection?

The first thing to recognize is that polls do have an effect on elections, that they do not necessarily manipulate voters because I do not believe that is the central issue, but that they do influence the results of electoral processes.

I make a very harsh statement, and that is that money, the media and political operators follow the polls. So a candidate who does well in a poll at the beginning of the campaign will have easier access to resources.

What is the explanation for high-profile cases of a candidate who is ahead in the polls and in the end that is not reflected in the ballot boxes?

Yes. In fact, I argue that Colombia has a functional democratic anomaly, in that one of the characteristics of our democratic system is that the results are not predictable. I review documents and show how whoever was winning the polls in January of election years normally does not end up being the president, except in the cases of re-election, which are different. I want to be emphatic that polls do not predict the future.

They simply measure political facts, but in doing so they also generate political facts themselves. I think it is wrong when someone tries to say that a good poll predicts the future.

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And there are pollsters that show opposite results…

Colombia has a thriving polling industry. In 1980 there were two or three firms; today there are 126 registered with the National Electoral Council. And as in every industry, there are people who do their job well, average and badly.

Does it address how much voters are influenced by polls?

Yes, that discussion is very interesting. Voters are of various types. But first, I make two defenses. One is that the Colombian political system is a functional democratic anomaly, where there are incredibly high levels of participation. In the last elections we were close to 60% if we accept the electoral census. In other discussions, with data from Dane, the Registry and other academics, we can be talking about 63%-64%, which few countries without compulsory voting manage to achieve. So this is a truly active democracy. But not everyone votes the same.

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What are the voters like?

I will make a characterization. First, we say that there are some non-voters who go to the democratic party and cast their vote blank or damage it on purpose; they are between 1 and 1.5 million people. There are the volatile ones who sometimes go and sometimes don’t (between 2 and 3 million). Then there is what I call the party structure, who always vote (from 3 to 5 million). Then there are those with political activism who are close (between four and five million people). And, finally, there are those who are active in opinion, who always go out to vote, who consider the right to vote to be a very important exercise and who change their minds. They are more than 10 million.

But the issue of opinion voting is regionalized, for example to Bogotá, or to the Coast. Does it apply to the whole country?

I think that this country is increasingly a country of opinion voting. What I do say is that to the extent that the city is more populated and people depend less on the State, the opinion voting will probably be greater.

Does it debunk myths such as reluctance to vote?

I try to demolish several of the critical myths of Colombian democracy.

There are people who say that it is simply a formality, and I try to prove that it is not. It is a functional democratic anomaly that generates a system of alternation in power.

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Where is the anomaly?

The anomaly is that here we have very high levels of violence and we also have levels of corruption that are really significant. These two things should make the democratic system collapse, but it does not collapse. Elections are held, 41 electoral processes have been held in 40 years, which is impressive. And I also show and confirm that we normally know the election result by 7 or 8 at night. No one can responsibly claim that large-scale fraud can be committed in Colombia.

There are two years left until elections that are going to be complex, according to experts. How is the sector preparing?

First, there are quality standards that firms have been adopting, which have to do with transparency and rigor, and we have to maintain that. Second, we must recognize that there have also been errors and that there is distrust on the part of citizens in us. We have to do a daily exercise of recovery and construction of credibility.

CONSTANCE GOMEZ GUASCA
Portfolio Journalist