We have relaunched!
Monday, January 30, 2017
“Every election cycle has its winners and losers: not
just the among the candidates, but also the pollsters.”
Nate Silver,
FiveThirtyEight
The 2015 UK General
Election, the EU Referendum (Brexit) and, most recently, the US Presidential
Election all produced results which most major pollsters and media outlets
failed to predict. In India we have had a plethora of similar experiences; the ones
immediately coming to mind are the 2004 Lok Sabha Polls; Delhi & Bihar
Assembly Polls of 2015.
- As a result, most polls are today increasingly being derided mostly as being extremely partisan and based on inaccurate interpretations and simplistic analysis
- Vote projection models and survey data often get lumped in with opinion polls but they represent very different methodological approaches and aims
Political numbers have been weaponised and so opinion polls are more often used as ammunition in partisan debates that generate more heat than light.
Polls nevertheless
have become indispensable to finding out what people think and how they
behave. They now pervade commercial and
political life. Poll results are constantly reported by national and local
media to a largely sceptical public.
Seemingly everyone has been contacted by a pollster or someone posing as
one. There is no escape from the flood
of information and disinformation flowing from polls. The internet has enhanced both the use and
misuse of such polls. Readers so
bombarded are therefore often unable to reliably tell a good poll from a bad
one.
Polling data is best
used as a measure of current public opinion. The majority of polls cover the
election as a “horserace”. It reports and informs the public which candidate or
party is winning today. But it rarely reveals the factors, motivations, and
reasons why particular groups of people support which candidate. Perhaps the only ready exception that comes
to mind being CSDS surveys.
Yet polling data is still
largely informative and exciting to follow, but we should be careful about
conclusions we make about present attitudes (from a single poll), about
conclusions based on just reading the headline (which could imprecisely
describe if not totally misrepresent polling results), or conclusions about the
outcome of the election (as polling data alone is not sufficient to predict the
future). Most significantly, horserace polling data also cannot provide
insights into how or why groups of people are more likely to support the major
party or candidates.
This blog Exit &
Opinion Polls India launched a few years back was an opportunity to do
something about these problems, triggered by the impulse to be different and
ask different questions. For me, the question was this: ‘Was it necessary to
critique the way in which opinion polls are carried out, reported and used in
political debate in order to ensure that they continue to be relevant and we
avoid the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?’
The answer was a big
resounding yes. This question set me off on a journey that led me to discover
the fathomless potential and depthless reach of the blogosphere. It led to an
appreciation of how blogs could play a vital role in opening up debate and
holding the media and pollsters accountable as well as enable increased
interactivity as afforded by internet.
The response which I received from my unpaid blogging efforts was simply phenomenal, one that truly astounded me. My posts in a very short time was within the top five searched by Google; this without any SEO tweaking or any paid boosting of reach.
Then for some reason, I thought I could take a break sometime after the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, and I found myself slipping into the vortex pull of a 2 ½ year unintentional hiatus. Unintentional because blogging became one of those things that drifted away as I let other things took over as priorities of life. The result: nothing exceptionally good.
Someone once said
that the suppression of the creative energy inside us was a dangerous thing.
Dangerous?? Really?? That’s a strong word, isn’t it? But then I thought about
my life happiness vis-à-vis blogging (blogging = proxy for reading and
writing), it couldn’t be truer. Something felt badly amiss. I needed a purpose,
something to expand my world, something my flirtation with FaceBook or Twitter
could not accomplish. When I finally decided to read and write again, all of
these suppressed energy found their outlet.
The response which I received from my unpaid blogging efforts was simply phenomenal, one that truly astounded me. My posts in a very short time was within the top five searched by Google; this without any SEO tweaking or any paid boosting of reach.
Then for some reason, I thought I could take a break sometime after the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, and I found myself slipping into the vortex pull of a 2 ½ year unintentional hiatus. Unintentional because blogging became one of those things that drifted away as I let other things took over as priorities of life. The result: nothing exceptionally good.
Someone once said
that the suppression of the creative energy inside us was a dangerous thing.
Dangerous?? Really?? That’s a strong word, isn’t it? But then I thought about
my life happiness vis-à-vis blogging (blogging = proxy for reading and
writing), it couldn’t be truer. Something felt badly amiss. I needed a purpose,
something to expand my world, something my flirtation with FaceBook or Twitter
could not accomplish. When I finally decided to read and write again, all of
these suppressed energy found their outlet.
So it led to this
decision of reactivation of the blog using the forthcoming five state assembly
polls as a launch pad. The relaunch coming after a 2 ½ year hiatus is a soft
launch, because one, the domain name had existed for years un-utilized and two,
with a reasonably wide blog following whose content demands remained unfilled. The
hiatus also helped introspection - of providing me a good idea of what went
right, what could have been done better and above all, what not to do.
Blogging, or intentional
creative efforts of any kind, at one level, is basically a craft. It’s a design
exercise - not just graphically, but internally, a design of content. It takes
effort and prodding and questionings. What do I want my creation to look like?
How do I iterate to find out what I want? If the question doesn’t get asked, a
journey doesn’t get discovered. And if things don’t get measured, they don’t
get improved.
One of the common feedbacks
from readers was that while the blog content was largely appreciated, it was
poorly designed in its functionality, colour schemes and reader friendliness.
The truth was that at the time when the blog was conceived, it was pursued
merely as a past time unpaid hobby that enabled an expression to my passion for
writing so much so these matters of professional designing of the blog was
completely side tracked. The blog have
now been redesigned and re-customised with the generous help of my college
going son. The result is this - what you are now seeing right now - a more professional
but simple template based blog. An unfortunate fallout of redesigning the
template was however the loss of all my previous content.
Finally, after launch we’ll be eager to hear from you, our readers, about what you think of the new site design and content as usual. Thank you all for your continued support and readership as the journey leads to exciting new frontiers in blogging.
Finally, after launch we’ll be eager to hear from you, our readers, about what you think of the new site design and content as usual. Thank you all for your continued support and readership as the journey leads to exciting new frontiers in blogging.
0 comments