Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Volodymyr Bondarenko, a pollster whose firm was tainted by virtue of a journalistic investigation. KP Media, photo by Oleksiy Boyko Polling business tainted, but still playing big role in elections

political question that sprouts whenever Ukrainians go to the polls, as they have four times in the last three years.

Voters have been bombarded with percentiles and parliamentary seat projections through the media from different firms that paint disparate pictures of public opinion.

This ambiguity has cast a shadow over Ukrainian sociology, and there is plenty of blame to be shared by politicians, media and the sociologists themselves. Rumors continue to spread that many pollsters fudge figures for a fee to boost voter confidence in the party that paid.

One effort to separate the sociological wheat from the pollster chaff brought together seven leading sociologists for a roundtable in Kyiv on Sept. 11.

“The same situation repeats itself from election to election,” said moderator Iryna Bekeshkina, academic director of roundtable organizer Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

Sociologists agreed that questionable poll results from fly-by-night firms are being used to manipulate public opinion. They also blamed journalists and television channels for generating confusion by airing unreliable poll results.

And it’s the sociologists’ own fault for failing to standardize approaches and methodologies, said Volodymyr Paniotto of the KMIS Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

Roundtable participants called for a law on sociology and licensing and state quality control for polling firms.

Present at the gathering were the heads of FOM Ukraine, the Razumkov Center’s sociological service, Ukrainian Sociology Service, the Research & Branding (R&B) company and the VSS All-Ukrainian Sociological Services.

Yevhen Kopatko, director of R&B, said that there are nearly a dozen “new players” on the political poll market for the Sept. 30 elections. He said the number is lower than the 19 companies that emerged to serve up numbers during last year’s race.

“We all know each other. It’s a rather narrow market. That is why when we see some strange person - who may formally be a sociologist, but with no experience working in the polls - presenting results of an unknown firm, questions arise, especially when results are remarkably different from the mainstream ones.”


Cross-examination

There were a number of tense and heated exchanges between sociologists as they talked about the latest numbers.

Borys Sahalakov, academic director of VSS, was criticized for poll results published last week that showed the Lytvyn bloc, Socialists and Progressive Socialists all qualifying for seats in parliament in addition to the front-running three blocs and the Communists. Sahalokov countered by predicting that election results will be falsified from 5 to 7 percent – nearly one-and-a-half million votes – on Sept. 30.

Also present was Volodymyr Bondarenko, a journalist-turned-sociologist who heads the board of the Shevchenko Institute of political, sociological and marketing research. He has been at the center of two journalistic scandals involving the Segodnya newspaper, which forms part of Rinat Ahkmetov’s media holdings.

Journalists at the paper claimed they purchased ratings that showed the evangelical Christian Bloc with 2.5 percent of the vote for $4,000. The Orthodox Bondarenko swore that the ratings were genuine and said that he would sue the newspaper and Akhmetov’s Ukrayina television company for libel and “donate the money together with Akhmetov to the children.” No other polls showed the Christian Bloc with strong results.

Bondarenko told the Post that “the other [polling firms] did not even include the Christian Bloc in their surveys. Look at the results the faithful delivered to [Evangelical Christian] Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky in Kyiv.”

He said that “the faithful have had enough of politics and are beating away from the devil.”


Fly-by-night operations

In July, Mykola Churylov, president of Socis Gallup and director of TNS Ukraine, published poll results that showed Kyiv Mayor Chernovetsky with approval ratings higher than those of President Viktor Yushchenko. Churylov, an advisor to the capital’s mayor, was not present or mentioned at the Sept. 11 roundtable. His organization once worked closely with DIF on exit polling, but broke ranks with exit poll consortium members in 2004 with numbers that favored presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych.

Churylov agreed that many “one-day firms” are created especially for election campaigns.

“Such firms are ready to provide any polls for money,” he said.

Bekeshkina said that it is simply too expensive to create a full-fledged sociological company just for the elections.

“You don’t have to create an entire company if you can just pay a person to present data from research that was never conducted. We’re not dealing with companies, but rather with trickery,” concluded Bekeshkina.

Andriy Yermolayev, Director of the ‘Sofia’ Center for Sociological Research, agreed that one-day sociological firms frequently offer imitation of data instead of actual research.

Yermolayev, also a political analyst, argued that trusted sociological firms possess their own databases, which allows them to conduct serious research work, along with polling.

Sociologists themselves say that a commercial sociological company needs a good record and authority to be a player on the market. Therefore, companies with years of experience are most trusted.

Speaking on the round table, Paniotto said that when evaluating a sociological company, one needs to consider the scope of conducted research, membership in international sociological organizations and the methodology of polls presented on a company’s website.


Villages, interviewers and insincerity

Some political scientists are not very confident in polls provided even by authoritative sociologists.

Serhij Vasilchenko, a veteran elections analyst, said that there is no single polling firm whose findings he absolutely trusts.

“There is the issue of reaching people living in the ‘deep’ villages far away from cities, good roads and public transport. Interviewers without their own cars will not reach them. Therefore the country’s depressed areas are often underrepresented in the polls.”

“The problem with sociology in Ukraine is with the interviewers. Even those interviewers who work for institutes and want to do a good job are limited for financial reasons. Some firms use students looking to earn extra money to do their fieldwork. You simply cannot make a living just from being an interviewer for a polling firm,” explained Vasilchenko.

Bekeshkina said interviewers are not a major problem if they are properly trained. The problem is that the market lacks well-qualified and experienced mid-level managers that conduct and sustain entire poll programs.

“After the last elections, DIF considered creating our own commercial polling service, because we relied on fieldwork from other firms. But we couldn’t find enough qualified people to run the operation. Those with experience were all busy.”

Vadym Karasiov, a political scientist and Director of the Institute of Global Strategies, said that Ukrainian sociologists sometimes have to face respondent insincerity.

“In the West people are used to expressing their opinion, it’s in their culture. Ukrainians lack that. Many people are either afraid or ashamed of expressing their views, which is part of the Soviet heritage. That’s why Ukrainian sociological firms face more problems here,” said Karasiov.

Trusted sources have told the Post that unpublished and allegedly un-fixed,polling figures show Regions with 32-30 percent; Byutwith 24-26 percent; Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense with 11-14 percent, and the Communists with 4.6 percent of the potential vote.The studies show that one or two other parties have a chance to pass the 3 percent barrier for seats in parliament.