According to the Afrobarometer survey, up to 96% of respondents want more transparency in elections, 89% want tighter law on campaign finance and accountability, and 74% want more time for determining presidential election petitions.
The question the survey results point to, however, is what these responses actually signify. Did these participants, who mainly stopped at primary education level, understand the complex issues and implications of their responses? How effective was the translation? What could have been the response if they were asked open-endedly what reforms in elections accountability they want without being asked simply to agree/disagree? What is the significance of the “agree, disagree” answers? Are responses the same if respondents have more options; such as “neither agree/disagree” or even “I don’t know”? Could the pollsters not have used another sampling strategy, say the stratified sampling method which focuses on specific target groups? Would this not have achieved more significant results and minimised the margin of error?
Francis Kibirige, the national coordinator of Hatchile Consult, the firm which did the survey on behalf of Afrobarometer told The Independent that they do not have many options. He said Afrobarometer does the survey in 36 African countries – not only Uganda to mainly track public opinion on democracy and governance.
“In order to do this well, we keep a certain core of questions intact so that you can be able to compare countries but also measure a country’s perceptions (of an issue) over time,” he said.
Kibirige says, however, besides the core questions, there are a number of questions that are included to measure country-specific democracy and governance issues.
“There are normally five questions to look at specific issues of the day which are either dominating discussions in the public sphere or will soon happen such that having public opinion on them is quite useful,” he said.
Each national partner team then drafts 15 or 20 themes that can be surveyed in the context of the country.
To further narrow the issues down, Afrobarometer then invites stakeholders from the media, government, business and civil society to contribute what issues they would want to be asked in the next round of surveys.
Then the team comes up with up to 30 questions which are sent to the regional core partner at the University of Nairobi who in turn trims the questions.
Kibirige says Afrobarometer has amongst its various committees, the Questionnaire Committee which has seasoned researchers and professors to review and refine these questions.
Upon that background, Kibirige rejects the opinion that research firms like Afrobarometer sometimes have an agenda and they tend to pinpoint issues they want to push through opinion polls.
But even then, he says, there is no research which is not guided by hypotheses because researchers will always have an opinion about an issue (hypothesis).
In the case of the age limit of the president, for instance, the issue is that Uganda has a president who is more popular, than his government or any other institution in the country, Kibirige says.
“But we have a situation where in four years’ time; he will not stand again going by the current constitution.
“So, although on the other hand, we would like to respect the Constitution, to disqualify someone on account of their age when they are still able to perform is discriminatory.”
“We wanted to find out what people think,” he says, “Afrobarometer simply does the research, does the analysis, presents the data out there and it is up to whoever wants to use it for their programmes.”
What people think
In the end, according to the survey, eight in ten Ugandans are in favour of a national dialogue to resolve the current political standoff following the 2016 elections. They also favour proposed reforms to improve elections and Parliament.
It also found that only 34% of Ugandans believe last year’s election was “completely free and fair” but 83% of Ugandans still support regular, open, and honest elections as the best way to choose their leaders.
Asked to either say “agree” or “disagree” for each of the following statements: (a) the disagreements over the 2016 elections highlight the need for a national dialogue, 84% of the respondents agreed; (b) for the sake of national unity, losing candidates should accept election results, 82% said they agree; (c) to reduce financial burden, reduce number of MPs, 79% agreed with the statement. Up to 74% of the respondents also said MPs should be facilitated to acquire personal cars instead of free-car giveaways while 66% of the respondents want the president to stop appointing MPs to Cabinet in order to safeguard their oversight role.
Almost 10 in 10 respondents (96%) said improving transparency during vote tallying, transmission, and declaration would help; 92% said they want the authorities to come up with measures that discourage use of forged qualifications and 89% said they want electoral officials individually held accountable.
The respondents were also asked to respond to the statement that the electoral law stopping any person older than 75 years from running as president in Uganda should be maintained and 75% agreed that the age limit should be maintained while 24% said that particular clause in the Presidential Elections Act is discriminatory and should not be allowed. Only 1% of the respondents did not know or refused to respond.
In spite of challenges, Afrobarometer’sfindinds are respected because it remains the leading pan-African, non-partisan research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, and economic conditions in Africa. It has been producing influential surveys for 25 years. Its main funders are highly reputable. They include the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and Department for International Development, the United States Agency for International Development, and the World Bank. Others are the Institute for Security Studies (South Africa), the United States Institute of Peace, Transparency International, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Duke University, and China Research Center.
Hippo Twebaze, a political and public policy analyst also says he may not be familiar with how pollsters frame the issues but if one doubts the reliability of Afrobarometer’s opinion polls, one needs to look at the pattern of their findings, particularly on elections in previous rounds.
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First, I should convey the Afrobarometer’s appreciation to The Independent magazine for using our data in writing this article. This is very much encouraged, and the network has developed an online-data-analysis facility (available at http://www.afrobarometer.org/online-data-analysis/analyze-online) to enable anyone run analysis from our data without the need for any statistical analysis packages.
This article raises two questions related to opinion polling: First – the choice and framing of questions asked, especially that survey questions asked did not mirror public interest and second – that the survey targeted people who are not qualified to answer these kind of questions. To briefly answer to these questions, (1) the framing of Afrobarometer survey questions meets international guidelines, this survey is conducted in 36 African countries and is wholly peer-reviewed. The Afrobarometer has been a recipient of the “Best Data Set Award 2004” from the American political Science Association, which is no easy feat. The 12 questions reported under this particular release are part of 281 questions directed asked to the respondent or 377 questions carried by the survey.
There are different types of questions, each with an array of possible ways to be framed depending on the survey context or target respondents. For some questions we have asked respondents to mention (off head) which issues the government should address first and foremost (i.e. spontaneous off-head responses), while in other instances we have asked respondents to make a choice of opinion given a public interest issue. The 12 law-reform proposals fall in this latter category. Responses from off-head spontaneous set or itemized choice items are essentially telling of the same opinion, and one is preferred over the other given a range of research factors. The key factor in the framing of questions is to avoid bias, a concept that is central to research design throughout the methodology of the research in question.
With respect to this article, the April 24 release (Afrobarometer Dispatch paper number 141 and available at http://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/publications/Dispatches/ab_r6_dispatchno141_uganda_social_services.pdf), refers to analysis of the Public Development Agenda component of our Round6 survey conducted in May 2015, while the latest release refers to polling of public support for some of the many reform issues that are relevant to the quality of our democracy and governance. With respect to this article, it should therefore not be expected that the batch of 12 questions on public support for law reforms should have been part of the spontaneous mentions of public development agenda, as the two sets are from two separate constructs, polled almost 2 years apart.
How then are poll questions selected? The general rule-of-thumb is that poll questions need to be relevant, scientifically testable interrogations of plausible hypotheses. And this could be to the discretion of researchers or study population or (frankly) both. The most critical element however is that questions – or the research setup in general – should avoid bias. All stages in the research process – including reporting – should avoid bias including statistical bias.
Lastly, the assertion in this article that ordinary people cannot form valid opinions on issues of democracy or governance is perhaps over-stated. Afrobarometer Working Paper #124 (available at http://afrobarometer.org/publications/wp124-understanding-citizens-attitudes-democracy-uganda, see page 17 – 18) shows that expert views on these kind of issues follows a similar trajectory as views held by ordinary citizens. Research suggests that both public opinion and expert views appear to agree on a direction (such as democratic governance or cost of living), such noting that such a condition is increasing or decreasing – but may not mention this observation at the same level. And that is critical in evaluating the importance of public opinion.
In sum, it would be wrong to ask ordinary people how to formulate these 12 proposals into new laws – that could be for technocrats – but polling public support for these proposals is technically possible.
And lastly, allow me note that the Afrobarometer is a pan-African network of research organizations now working in 36 African countries. This network conducts and disseminates its own research, and does not accept funding from governments or political parties/groups and is wholly donor funded. The Afrobarometer core objective is to 1) conduct high-quality scientific research of public opinion on the African continent, 2) provide a voice to public opinion in the policy-making arena and 3) provide capacity for research in Africa. Since the year 1999, the Afrobarometer has conducted over 200,000 interviews with ordinary African in over 145 surveys across 36 African countries, and still counting. The network is wholly peer-reviewed, has an international advisory board and takes technical support from the University of Cape Town and Michigan State University. More info at http://www.afrobarometer.org
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