display
"Robert" Ting-Yiu Chung is neither a political activist nor a resistance fighter.
Political zeal is far from him, and provocation is neither his business nor his interest.
Chung is a researcher.
He is the managing director of a private survey institute in Hong Kong and also teaches as a professor at the university there.
I have known him for many years because we were active together in the “World Association for Public Opinion Research” (WAPOR), the world association of scientifically-oriented survey researchers.
In 2012, at my suggestion, he organized the WAPOR annual conference at the University of Hong Kong.
We also discussed political research there in an informal, open manner and without any worries.
In the years that followed, I saw the regime gradually increase the pressure on Robert Chung and survey research in Hong Kong.
In 2014, at Chung's request, I wrote an opinion on the quality of the polls published on the then new laws on the selection of heads of government.
display
The government had relied on dubious sources to support its claims that the laws were popular, while attempting to discredit the unfavorable results of the independent polls.
Last year, after the so-called "Security Law" was passed, it took only a few days for Chung's offices to be searched.
Detected “For National Security”
We recently received news that his name was on the "National Security" list.
He is now at large, but the police came back to his office a few days ago and took the server away.
It is probably only a matter of time before he is either completely incapacitated for work or ends up in prison.
The Robert Chung case is typical of societies in which authoritarian rulers usurp power.
Survey research can only thrive in free societies.
It is noticeable that the development of modern survey research has run parallel with the democratization of the world.
display
The first steps were taken at the beginning of the 20th century in England and above all in German-speaking countries, but when the National Socialists came to power, the tradition broke off and the most important researchers, above all the Viennese social psychologists Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Hans Zeisel and Marie Jahoda, wandered to the United States.
It was there that the representative poll method experienced its final breakthrough in the American presidential elections in 1936 and was carried back to liberated Europe at the end of the war.
In other regions of the world too, for example in Latin America since the 1980s and in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989/1990, survey research on democracy followed immediately.
Conversely, the decline in survey research and the decline of the Free Press are a sure sign that a democracy is being superseded by an authoritarian regime.
A particularly impressive example is the brief flourishing of a very lively research landscape in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War and its sudden end when the communists came to power in 1948.
display
In this context, the history of the Russian survey institute WZIOM, which was founded in the last years of the Soviet Union as the first survey institute and which quickly gained a good reputation, is also instructive.
In 2003, the Russian Ministry of Property Relations installed civil servants on the institute's board of directors, apparently to oversee its work.
The head of research at the time, the sociologist Juri Lewada, avoided this attempt to take control by quitting his work at the institute and all his staff and continuing work elsewhere and under a new name, so that the ministry could ultimately only take over empty rooms.
Polls pose a threat to dictators
Survey researchers, like other social scientists, provide scientifically based and verifiable information that is independent of state propaganda.
In doing so, they are questioning the basis of the legitimation of all tyranny.
From a dictator's point of view, there can hardly be a more serious threat than the prospect that the thesis, which the propaganda machine has put to great expense, that the whole people support the Führer will be belied by independent polls.
The freedom of the social sciences is just as important for a democratic society as the freedom of the press.
It is all the more remarkable that this fact is by no means consensus even in democratic societies.
In Germany, too, the demand to restrict the rights of survey research, for example to prohibit the publication of surveys before an election, has been made with regularity.
Strangely enough, such demands are usually given the reason that this serves to protect democracy, because the poll results could influence the voters.
But if this is to be reason enough for a ban, the first thing to do is to ban the publication of newspapers and television news before an election, an idea that probably nobody would seriously consider.
A society without surveys is a society in which the corrective to rumors, mere assumptions or even fabricated claims about the mood in the country is lacking.
Dictators harass anyone they believe could be dangerous to them.
This affects many population groups.
After the attempted coup in Turkey in 2016, I once tried to research how many people were arrested in the months that followed for getting in the way of the regime.
The numbers given at that time fluctuated between 18,000 and 40,000.
These included 8,000 to 10,000 members of the military, almost as many police officers, over 2,000 judges and prosecutors, 1,400 members of the HDP party, hundreds of intellectuals such as teachers and scientists, and around 100 to 150 journalists.
In the German press, however, one could find out almost exclusively about the journalists.
display
It is understandable if journalists, like probably members of all other sections of the population, are particularly interested in the fate of their professional colleagues, but this cannot be a justification for ignoring all the other groups concerned.
When “Reporters Without Borders” publishes its annual report on the state of press freedom worldwide, this topic is - rightly - given a lot of space in all relevant media.
On the other hand, I cannot remember that the WAPOR report on the freedom of survey research, which admittedly appears less frequently for reasons of cost, ever found its way into a German medium.
Robert Chung has been the elected Vice President of the World Association for Public Opinion Research since January 1st of this year.
In just under two years he will assume the office of President.
He will not only be the 39th WAPOR president since the organization was founded in 1947, but it is likely that he will also be the first political prisoner in this office.
Will someone report about it then?
Source: Martin UK Lengemann
Thomas Petersen is project manager at the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy and private lecturer in communication science at the Technical University of Dresden. From 2009 to 2010 he was President of the World Association for Public Opinion Research.