The Indian Republic Opinion Poll Rankings-Find which Poll to Trust for Election Season

Every important election in India sees political parties express opinions about opinion polls. Every now and then there is a call to ban them or at the very least regulate them. In a democracy, one of the most treasured virtues is the freedom to express opinions and hence we at The Indian Republic feel that banning them will go against the very spirit of our constitution. We do however believe that it is important for people to know which polls are more accurate. Hence, today we present India’s first ever opinion poll rankings. It is a market determined method of regulation vs. one that may be imposed by the state.

The Indian Republic team has analysed predictions and actual results for 2009 General elections and the major state elections since 2011 for the Opinion Poll Ranking – these states include Punjab, Gujarat, UP, Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Assam. Eyeing the top spot are four contenders – CVoter, AC Nielsen, CSDS and ORG. Post collation of data from publicly available sources The Indian Republic developed a multi-criterion decision making algorithm to assign a final score to each of them (details below) – While opinion polls claim an error margin of between 3-5% we found several instances where the error margins were over 10%. Thus, the model we have developed ranks the polls relative to each other where the focus is on which poll result is closest to the final results. And the results are as follows:

The winner of the Opinion Poll Ranking is CSDS with a comfortable margin. CVoter comes second while ORG and AC Nielsen are third and fourth. It is also important to note media companies that commonly release the results of these surveys – CSDS polls are released by CNN IBN, CVoter polls are released by Times Now, ORG polls are released by Headlines Today-Aaj Tak, AC Nielsen polls are released by Star (now ABP). It is often said that media agencies biases are reflected in opinion poll results.

This equation becomes even more interesting when ownership of media houses changes. For example after a star performance in 2009 General elections, AC Nielsen polls were lagging until recently – once the ownership transferred from Star to ABP it scored in our model in the recent Karnataka elections.

So what differentiates the results of these polls? – methodology is the most important when it comes to surveys. This includes factors like whether a) the sample is random, representative, stratified random etc. b) what is the sample size c) was the survey conducted over the phone or in a face-to-face interaction d) when were the polls conducted etc. CSDS holds the reputation of having the right mix wherein the sample is stratified random which ensures that the sample is both representative and random, it has relatively large sample sizes and is done in a face-to-face interview. While CVoter also follows some of the best industry practices, its surveys are often based on telephonic interviews that are spread over a large period of time.

The scoring matrix gives 0.5 pts if the poll estimate is closest to the party with the highest number of seats, 0.33 if it is closest to the party with the second highest number of seats and 0.167 if it is closest to the party/others with the third highest number seats. These weights have been determined by a multi-criteria decision making model using pair wise ranking of alternatives. (Other agencies which wish to be ranked using our algorithm can contact us and we will include them in future rankings)

Score Break-up:

Before having a look at what the polls are predicting for upcoming elections let us have a look at the predictions and the actual results over the past several elections for each of the polls.

So what do these surveys predict for the upcoming 2013 state-elections of Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh:

Source: TheIndianRepublic.com