Pressure at the Exit

A juicy scandal has erupted among Ukraine’s sociologists. What is more, it erupted (or, to be more precise, continued) at a press conference, where the National 2004 Exit Poll Consortium disclosed the final results of exit polls last Thursday. As a result, the heads of the Socis and Social Monitoring centers announced that their organizations would be withdrawing from the consortium.

It will be recalled that just months before the elections Ukraine’s four leading sociological survey organizations formed a consortium to conduct exit polls. The sociologists decided to work according to a method used successfully during previous election campaigns — the simple interview method. Yet, a week before the survey (i.e., October 31), the heads of two organizations, Kyiv’s International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and the Razumkov Center, announced that it would be better to use a different polling technique, secret questionnaires. Their partners, the Socis and Social Monitoring centers, rejected the experiment, as they doubted its reliability. As a result, in the evening following the end of voting the consortium publicized two essentially different results. According to KIIS and the Razumkov Center, Viktor Yushchenko was leading by a 6.4-% margin, while the interview-based exit polls showed that Viktor Yanukovych had a 4.4% advantage. In announcing the results, the sociologists warned that these conclusions were preliminary and subject to revision. However, many people began to fear that the revision of results would not solve the problem of non-coincidence, which cropped up for the first time within the ranks of sociologists precisely during this election (in surveys conducted before and after the voting). Even if the consortium had managed to avert a scandal, the original disparity between the results would still have called into question the objectivity of not so much sociologists as the science of sociology. For if different methods produce such different results in such a vital sociological survey, how can the man in the street know which of them he should trust?

A scandal could not be averted, even though the consortium produced revised results. Yet the polls conducted by KIIS and the Razumkov Center showed, like before, that Yushchenko was ahead — 44.6% vs. 37.8% for Yanukovych. The other two centers presented their results separately. Socis also showed the opposition’s leading candidate by a mere 0.9% (42% vs. 41%), while Social Monitoring reported that Yanukovych was leading by 1.1% (41.2% vs. 40.1%). But even these figures are not final, said Ilko Kucheriv, director of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation. Socis director Mykola Churilov said that the difference in the results announced immediately after the elections and now was caused by his error. According to Churilov, who was one of the authors of the survey technique, he failed to take into account the factor of the labor migration, which “essentially affected the results of the survey.” Mr. Churilov emphasized that when this factor was taken into account, there was an altogether different result.

Mr. Kucheriv in turn pointed out that “a wonder occurred: in the final analysis, in contrast to the previous results (as of 2:00 p.m. on October 31 — Author), the results of Socis and Social Monitoring considerably changed in favor of one of the candidates (Yanukovych — Author).” In his next statement Kucheriv in fact accused the two centers’ directors of falsification: “As a project manager, I think I was duped: they produced flawed figures by making use of our resources.”

Meanwhile, Social Monitoring director Olha Balakireva announced there had been no corrections at all. She said she had been under “relentless pressure” in the past 24 hours and added that she was withdrawing from the consortium. “I don’t want to work under pressure, I don’t want to work for an arranged result — which is the very thing that is happening today,” she said, noting that Ukrainian experts had not tested the method of anonymous boxes, which her colleagues employed. “A certain result is being contracted for at this moment,” Ms. Balakireva believes. She added that contractors should take due account of sociologists. “Either there must be a dialogue with sociologists or there is no place for sociologists in this society,” she said. Ms. Balakireva also said that on November 2-3 her center, together with the Ukrainian Institute of Strategic Studies, conducted a survey that showed that in the first round 39% and 35% of respondents voted for Yanukovych and Yushchenko, respectively. Then she walked out of the press conference.

Shortly afterwards, Mr. Churilov also announced that his center would be withdrawing from the consortium. “I cannot work in a consortium where there is no unity, where experts come under relentless pressure, and nobody cares about their opinion,” he said. According to this sociologist, on Wednesday the consortium’s sponsors (eight embassies and four international foundations — Author) began to arm-twist the sociologist into applying a certain work method, namely, secret questionnaires. “I don’t want to use methods that I fear are not reliable,” Mr. Churilov said. He also expressed the opinion that the consortium fell apart long before the exit poll, because it decided to employ different technologies.

The results of the consortium’s surveys will be examined soon by the Sociological Association of Ukraine. Perhaps this will finally set the record straight. Yet it is quite clear that the consortium, as an association of Ukraine’s four most authoritative sociological organizations, no longer exists. We will therefore have to deal with the results of an even greater number of exit polls, which in fact means that such an effective instrument of democracy as the exit poll, which was supposed to mirror the popular will of Ukrainian citizens, has gone haywire at the current stage (with the conscious or unconscious involvement of sociologists themselves) and will become the subject of endless disputes and haggling. Even today the debate around methods has acquired a political coloring and is likely to be exploited, like any other disparities in figures and opinions, by various political forces to defend their position.