Arya News - How are election polls conducted? And how reliable are they in predicting people`s actual voting behaviour? The opinion researcher Manfred Güllner has the answers to these questions.
Mr Güllner, the 2025 Bundestag election is coming up. Opinion polling is done to predict the population"s voting behaviour. How reliable are these estimates?
A poll can only ever show the political mood at the time it is conducted. This may differ from the actual votes cast on voting day, as some voters will only make up their mind shortly before the election or because current events that occur during the election campaign have an impact on opinions. Regular surveys conducted before an election can, however, reflect the process of opinion formation or the assessment of what the parties have to offer in terms of content and personnel, quite reliably.
How exactly are polls conducted? How many people are interviewed in which way and where?
To get representative results, respondents must be selected carefully to make sure that all groups are represented equally in the sample, in the same way they are in the overall population. This includes all age groups, levels of education and professions, all supporters of individual parties and all geographic regions within the area considered. 1,000 or sometimes even fewer respondents are enough to get a reliable overall result. The poll itself can take place in various ways: through personal interviews conducted in the selected households, phone interviews, by means of online surveys or using a mixture of different methods. Phone interviews have been found to be the best choice for election research .
Social media is by now playing an important role in political opinion making . How is this taken into account?
The intensity of social media use can be determined through surveys in the same way as the use of traditional media. It is therefore possible to fathom the impact that social media has on opinion formation among citizens in polls in the same manner as the impact of traditional media can be determined.
Do published polls have an impact on voter behaviour?
Contrary to certain allegations, published poll results do not influence voter behaviour. This can be seen in voting behaviour in the USA, for example, where voters in California have never been verifiably influenced, even by existing election results from Florida, which are far more relevant than the results of a poll.
Which measures do you take to counteract disinformation in opinion polling?
It is important to ensure that real people are interviewed, regardless of the polling method used. At Forsa this is ensured, even for online polls. More than 150,000 individuals are registered with "omninet" to repeatedly take part in online surveys. People can, however, not register for this so-called online panel themselves but are recruited by means of ongoing telephone interviews.
Manfred Güllner is the founder and managing director of the Forsa Institute and one of Germany"s best-known opinion researchers.
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