The Government's climb-down on opinion polls is lamentable for a number of reasons, but especially because it may prevent this issue being revisited for a long time.
The measure as proposed was undoubtedly flawed, and Senator Shane Ross is to be congratulated for the perceptive analysis which led to the Bill being withdrawn; but the argument concerning the dangers of opinion polling remains, and we have been done a great disservice by the media's insistence on promoting their own interests rather than facilitating a proper debate.
Those who oppose controls on polling are correct in saying the opinion poll issue is about the health of our democracy. However, their emphasis on the alleged risk to freedom of speech is deeply suspect, since polls result not from the voluntary articulation of political views but the solicitation of such views in clinically controlled conditions for a commercial purpose. You might as well argue that a national census extends free speech to householders, or that a door-to-door criminal investigation involving mass fingerprinting represents an exercise in democracy.
Democracy is accessible to everyone; polls are not. You can only be polled if you are "fortunate" enough to have the pollster knock on your door and if you conform to one of the profiles on the clipboard setting out that element of the poll protocol. The instant response of many people to the subject of opinion polls is to say they either do not understand how they work or do not trust them because they have never themselves been polled.
This rather unscientific outlook is understandable since, at the present rate of polling, the average voter would require to live for about five average lifetimes to have an average chance of being polled just once. Where is the democracy in that?
But there is an even more worrying aspect to the poll culture, which goes far beyond anything capable of being addressed by restrictions during an election campaign. The inventor of opinion polling, George Gallup, once explained his theory using a comparison with counter beans. I have mislaid the quotation, but can recall its substance. Gallup said the principle of opinion polling was that if you had an equal number of, say, black beans and red beans mixed in a barrel, and if you put in your cupped hand and took out a handful of, say, 20 beans, you should be able to predict that you would have about an equal number of each colour, with the likelihood of error falling within a mathematically-predictable margin.
Experience has given this theory the status of scientific reality.
So, the issue is not whether the theory of opinion polling works. It does. Neither is it a question of whether or not a poll result amounts to useful information concerning the views of voters or the likely outcome of an election. Again, occasional blips notwithstanding, polls have a remarkable record of accuracy.
A far more interesting question is: are we happy that, as human beings with all the capacities of that condition, we have, in our political lives, tended to function more and more in such a manner that our capacity for individuality and original thought has become as predictable as the behaviour of inert objects in a barrel? This question opens up an entirely different view of opinion polls. Before arriving at it, one might assume that the widely-accepted relative accuracy of opinion polling has to do with the integrity of the scientific methodology alone.
But what if the reliability of opinion polls in anticipating human behaviour is the consequence of the emergence of a particular form of political culture, of which opinion polling is a central and vital element? In other words, perhaps opinion polls are reliable not because human beings are naturally no more interesting than beans, but because the kind of political society we have created tends to make us so, having debased our politico-intellectual stock to a thin gruel, with little substance, roughage or nourishment.
Is it possible the public discourse is the result not of the spontaneous public articulation of the cumulative concerns, aspirations and perspectives of the population, but a debased, reduced, recycled and jaded agenda, driven from an invisible centre and legitimated by opinion polls? And is it possible that opinion polls are the transmission system of this process? In other words, for "bandwagon effect" read "sheep-like behaviour".
Perhaps it is possible to create an altogether different kind of society, in which people would not function like sheep, in which the viewpoint of an electorate comprising millions of people could not be ascertained by reference to a tiny sample of 1,000 people or fewer. Such a society, were it possible, would certainly be infinitely more interesting, but also a lot less manageable than our present one.
Perhaps the political culture we have created is not the absolute form of democratic freedom at all but a circumscribed social existence bound by unseen but none the less firm boundaries. And perhaps the meaning of democratic freedom - what it is, what threatens it, and wherein may reside the limits of its full potential - amounts to something a little more complex than the notions championed by media cheerleaders in recent weeks.
jwaters@irish-times.ie