{UAH} Polling Uganda Style: Or How To Make Numbers Fit
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9:24 AM |
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Since Uganda's Presidential campaigns got underway in November 2015, several polls have suggested the incumbent President is highly popular in rural areas, and therefore he would have won on Feb 18, 2016 even if the voting had been free of the many irregularities witnessed by citizens and election observers. This assumption was repeated in several international news stories leading up to the election but there are reasons to question it, beyond the obvious reality that polls are never reliable in a dictatorship.
1) All polls in Uganda are subject to tight state control and surveillance.
In order to conduct a poll in Uganda, researchers need a license from the National Council for Science and Technology which is under the Internal Security Organization—Uganda's FBI. The NCST reviews both the questionnaire and the sampling frame, which means its officials know where the researchers are going in advance.
The NCST informs the LC1, the DISO and the RDC all of whom are regime appointees, before the fieldworkers arrive. Even if respondents are able to answer questions in confidence, the mere presence of such officials in the vicinity would be intimidating, not to mention the risk that some respondents may well have been coached or coerced, in advance. Even if they weren't, their answers may not reflect their true opinions because of implicit intimidation. In 2012, Afrobarometer conducted a survey of Ugandans' views of democracy. At the end, respondents were asked who they thought was behind the survey. Even though they had been assured at the beginning that the researchers were independent, 40% said they thought they had actually been sent by the government.
2) Local polling firms have an incentive to come up with results favorable to the regime because it controls so many local contracts.
In early 2015, the Daily Monitor hired a Kenyan research firm to conduct a nationwide presidential poll. They chose the company because so many other groups had operations in Uganda, had received contracts from Ministries and other government bodies and were seeking more and were therefore considered less likely to be impartial. The Ugandan government has been known to retaliate against companies that don't support the National Resistance Movement, and many businesspersons who are known opposition supporters have been deprived of business, harassed with lawsuits, had their bank accounts seized for arbitrary reasons etc.
After the Kenyan firm completed its poll, the Monitor discovered that the company was also seeking contracts from the regime and this likely compromised its findings. The Monitor originally intended to follow up its original poll with a second one, but scrapped the idea after concluding that it was impossible to conduct an accurate poll in the current political climate.
3) The Oxford Analytica poll conducted in Nov/Dec 2015 is troubling for reasons other than those listed above.
In December 2015, the authors of the Oxford poll published an article in the East African newspaper claiming that, Museveni held a strong lead in rural Uganda.
The authors didn't print their statistical findings, but they did make a Museveni win seem highly likely. In scholarly circles, discussing findings in the popular media in advance of academic publication—even if the details are left out-- is frowned upon because it precludes scrutiny of methods and potential sources of bias and conflicts of interest—not only of the researchers themselves, but also of their fieldworkers, funders and so on. Bias is an enormous problem in academic research, and it is not clear what motivated the Oxford researchers to publish such an article when they did. The research subject in this case was a highly controversial election in a tense political climate, rendering the researchers' decision to go public with their predictions without detailing their methods very puzzling indeed.
One reason the Oxford researchers believe their findings accurately reflect the voting intentions of the Ugandan people is that many respondents who said they intended to vote for Museveni openly complained to the field teams about basic services including health care, education, roads and so on. However, if the researchers understood Ugandan political culture, they would know that there is no contradiction here. In rural areas especially, it is generally acceptable to blame lower level officials for incompetence and corruption, but often very dangerous to publicly criticize the President, his family and the regime. Indeed, complaints about petty officials and deflection of criticism away from the incumbent are routine, even among judges and high level officials, let alone highly vulnerable rural villagers. This is not so different from the situation in China or Eastern Europe under Communism, for example, where many people complained about corrupt, incompetent local officials, but knew that being openly critical of the system and its top leadership could have very serious consequences indeed.
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