Amsterdam tells city stats agency to stop polling voter sentiment, election forecasts
After over 35 years, the municipality of Amsterdam has instructed its statistics agency to stop publishing voter opinion polls during election periods. Since the 1980s, the city’s Research & Statistics (O&S) agency has been publishing polls which use data on voter satisfaction and convert it into estimates about the number of seats various parties would occupy in City Council. The agency will no longer forecast voter sentiment and seat polling for upcoming elections, Parool reported.
The decision follows critical questions from the VVD and D66 after the O&S’s polls before the municipal elections this past spring. The polls deviated quite significantly from the final election results. The VVD polled at four seats in February and won six seats in March. The same poll had the PvdA at nine seats, but the Labour Party ended up seating seven council members.
The VVD and D66 wondered whether the polling may be influencing parties’ campaigning and how voters view the parties. Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema referred to previous research showing that polls have a limited effect on the above. But she also believes that municipal departments must distance themselves from activities that could be interpreted as influencing voter decisions, she wrote to the city council.
“Any appearance of influencing election results by a municipal department is undesirable,” Halsema wrote. She has therefore decided that the O&S will stop predicting the distribution of seats in the city council ahead of municipal elections. Conducting election polls is not part of the municipality’s duties, so the seat poll will be permanently removed from the O&S’s remit, she said.
Halsema added that the O&S’s polls go beyond predicting the election result. Over the past 35 years, the agency has developed a “usable and careful method” to investigate which topics Amsterdammers were concerned about, how they viewed the city, and why they did or did not intend to vote. The service will continue to conduct this type of research, but will not translate that data into an expected distribution of seats.
The mayor’s letter to the city council also revealed a possible reason why the last O&S poll differed so much from the election results. O&S worked with a sample from its own city panel, in which young people, people with lower levels of education, and ethnically diverse residents are underrepresented.
In the first poll, the researchers therefore conducted additional surveys at markets and in shopping streets. But the second poll was based entirely on the O&S city panel.
