Why does our government so heavily rely on public opinion polls? Honestly, I can't understand why the government bases it's decisions on them. For one, polls are extrememly unreliable. Not only do people's opinions change from a day-to-day basis, but even the very wording of the questions used to poll people can cause different results. Pollsters can use a technique called leading questions, where the question lead the person being polled to feel that only one response is correct, the one the pollster wishes people to choose, of course. And why do leaders think that the general public knows all that much about the topic being polled anyways? Using polls as fact is basing our government on the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Most people don't know the facts of hot topics these days. They only know what TV reporters and newspapers tell them, which is rarely the full story anyways. Then there is the issue of "random sampling". How random can that possibly be? Oftentimes, those polled are hardly random at all, just those the interviewers know will answer the question "correctly". And what about those not polled? What about their opinions? Would it effect the poll's outcome if they had been interviewed? We don't know. That's why many polls include a margin of error, usually about 3 or 4 percent. But more and more often, this error is left off when the poll is reported. Somehow, the polls that we've always known to be rather innacurate have turned into the Bible of politicians and news reporters.
Maybe our government should consider taking the country where it needs to go instead of where the people think they want to go. We don't need polls to tell us where we are so our leaders can take us there. If that's what the framers of the Constitution wanted, they would've left it at the Articles of Confederation that we had before.
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this is so true, as i learned in statistics this year. another thing to consider is people like my statistics teacher, who enjoy answering "wrongly", if there is such a thing. She has the education to sway the findings in whichever direction she wants. If the person giving the poll/survey asks a question that leads her in a certain way, she votes the opposite. these polls are not fact, and i dont know why people act like they are.