Germany's Fickle Political Polls

It was so much simpler in the old days.

Every four weeks, the country’s polling institutes would present the results of their campaign surveys that asked a sample group of Germans who they would vote for should federal elections be held the following Sunday. The Sunday polls, as they’re called, were politely paid attention to, but saved exhaustive analysis.

How things have changed. Polls on Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his challenger Edmund Stoiber’s chances have appeared every week in the months leading up to the Sept. 22 elections. The results, commissioned by newspapers and television stations, are quickly broken down and then reassembled again as the basis of the week’s news stories. Graphics with line charts appear showing a candidate's rise or fall.

The trend is somewhat troubling to Hans Jürgen Weiss, professor at the Insitute for Media and Communication Studies at Berlin’s Free University. The campaign researcher said that the “exponential” increase in polling has reduced the quality of the results.

“The quality of the research suffers as a result of competition between the institutes,” said Weiss, in a DW-WORLD interview. “The accuracy also suffers.”

Everyone's a winner

Witness polls taken this week followed Germany’s media events in the past two weeks: the floods in East Germany and the televised debate between Schröder and Stoiber.

Analysts predicted Schröder and his Social Democrats would win votes following the chancellor’s handling of the flood disaster and his self-assured debate appearance. Polls taken by the FORSA institute seemed to confirm their predictions, giving the SPD 38 percent – two points more than previous weeks – and bringing them within two points of Stoiber’s Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union bloc.

Particularly dramatic was the SPD’s progress in polls following the conclusion of the Sunday debates. FORSA revealed that Schröder scored more points than Stoiber in a majority of personal categories, such as sympathy and competence. Other polls by the institutes Infratest dimap and Forschungs Wahlgruppe (Voter Group Research) posted similar results.

The Schröder camp declared victory. Stoiber and the Union bloc cried foul.

Polling institutes' political ties

A day after the poll results were splashed across Germany’s front pages, the Union accused FORSA, whose director is a longtime member of the SPD, of playing sides.

“FORSA is a campaign instrument for the SPD,” said CDU Laurenz Meyer earlier this week amid Union fears the polls would give Schröder’s a push.

He pointed to polls taken by the Insitute for Public Opinion Research in Allensbach, which showed the SPD winning only 32.9 percent of the vote, a one percent increase over the weeks before. The Union remained solid at 40.1 percent.

“The numbers show that the situation for the Union on Sept. 22 looks good,” Meyer said.

Like FORSA, the whiff of party politics hovers above Allensbach, Germany's oldest polling firm, as well. Its 85-year-old founder, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, was a longtime political advisor to former CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Accusations are "dumb stuff"

Both polling institutes emphatically deny their results are in any way tainted by the party preference of their leading officials.

“We don’t falsify our data,” said FORSA chief Manfred Güllner, adding Meyer’s accusation was “dumb stuff.” Allensbach says their face-to-face method of research, as opposed to the telephone polls FORSA does, is one of the main reasons the institutes offer such different results.

Weiss also dismisses accusations like Meyer’s.

“An institute’s main business is not political research, but media and marketing research – so they have to work professionally,” he said. “My impression is that the the actual numbers don’t favor anyone, rather it’s the interpretation of those numbers.”

Analysts have four more weeks to spend hunched over the weekly polls, predicting either a Schröder comeback, or a Stoiber march to victory.

Weiss says the practice will repeat itself with greater frequency in coming elections. It is something he calls the “professionalization,” of German campaigning through American political influence.