Iranian Opinion and the June Election
WorldPublicOpinion.org, a collaborative project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, has just released the fascinating results of a telephone poll conducted in Iran at the end of August and early September. You can find the summary at:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep09/IranUS_Sep09_rpt.pdf
The questionnaire and responses to each question are at:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep09/IranUS_Sep09_quaire.pdf
Since Iran does not permit on-the-ground polling, several excellent organizations have taken to conducting surveys by randomized telephone calls from outside the country using native Farsi speakers. More than 80% of all Iranian households have land-line telephones, so it is possible to get a sizable sample. And a lot of Iranians seem to be willing to give their views over the phone, so it is possible to acquire significant indicators, especially if the surveys are repeated over time. The organization Terror Free Tomorrow conducted a similar poll in May 2009 and WPO did earlier polling in February 2008; their findings are compared in the WPO study.
I am not a statistician or a polling expert. It is enough for me to know that the poll was conducted by a highly respected organization, e.g. WPO/PIPA, using scientifically accepted polling techniques that are spelled out in the report. All polling is subject to error, but I have no doubt that the results provided by WPO are an accurate reflection of what they were told by a wide swath of the Iranian public.
My question is what it all means, particularly with regard to the recent election and its aftermath. And this report is overflowing with anomalies and contradictions.
Nearly one-third of the more than 1000 Iranians polled in this survey said that their own family’s economic situation had grown worse over the past four years; 45% said that the economic conditions of Iran had grown worse in that same time period. However, when asked “How much of the time do you think you can trust the national government in Tehran to do what is right?” by huge margins they say that they trust the government to take the right decisions most or some of the time (85%), up more than ten percent from the WPO poll in February 2008, and they expressed positive views about every major government institution by a margin of 70-80 percent or more.
We all know that people can hold two contradictory opinions in their heads at the same time. Americans routinely scoff at the Congress but at the same time express confidence in their own senators and representatives. In the Iranian survey, the question of trusting the government was not linked in any way to economic circumstances, so respondents might have been thinking about security or even religious issues when they answered. After all, 57% of the respondents said that Iran was better able to resist foreign pressures than four years earlier.
Much more significant is the set of responses about the recent election, where 85 percent of eligible voters reportedly went to the polls and where President Ahmadinejad was declared the winner by a landslide 63 percent over Mir Hossein Moussavi (34 percent), Mehdi Karroubi (one percent) and Mohsen Rezaie (two percent).
In the PIPA sample, 87 percent said they had voted, which is remarkably consistent with the official tally. But the breakdown of the vote is quite different: Ahmadinejad 55 percent; Moussavi 14 percent; and four percent for the other two candidates. In other words, Ahmadinejad has lost nearly 9 percent from the official tally, and Moussavi has lost 20 percent. Perhaps even more intriguing is that an astonishing one out of four refused to say how they had voted. Why?
As a thought experiment, imagine that everyone who voted for Ahmadinejad (and perhaps some who didn’t) find it expeditious and politically safe to announce their support for the president, while many of those who voted for opposition candidates fear that an admission might be risky. If all the refusenik and “don’t know” votes are assigned to Moussavi, his total goes up to more than 40 percent.
When asked how they would vote if the election were to be held tomorrow, Ahmadinejad’s support drops to 49 percent, while 22 percent say either that they would not vote or refused to answer. This may be the most significant figure in the report, since a 49 percent vote for Ahmadinejad would require a runoff. That is what many opposition and outside observers actually expected, in view of Ahmadinejad’s support in many sectors and the active support of the national media.
The reality is, we will probably never know.
There is one other troubling element in this report: the nature of the sample. Although carefully balanced by geographic distribution, age, sex, ethnicity, etc., it does not appear to be representative of the Iranian body politic in several respects. It is limited to people with land line telephones. Apparently they were not asked if they or other family members have a cell phone. Two-thirds of the respondents said that they do not have access to the internet, and of those who did only about ten percent accessed it regularly.
Iran is a highly wired country with more than 60,000 regular bloggers. It is also a country where cell phones, as is true around the world, are becoming ubiquitous (30 million in 2007, which is the latest reliable data I could find). Cell phone and internet are the two principal means of disseminating information about opposition activities. They are also the preferred form of communication of the 33% of eligible voters who are under the age of 30.
Eighty percent of the respondents in this study also say that they do not listen to any foreign news sources. That may be a fair representation of the listening habits of the Iranian public as a whole, but taken together with the lack of access to the internet it may help explain the answers to a series of questions on Iran’s political system.
For whatever reason, the telephone respondents to this study appeared to be barely aware of any controversy over the June elections. In addition to their overwhelmingly positive opinions about every aspect of the current political system and all of its institutions, their expressed positions were almost identical to the interpretations that dominate the official media in Iran. It may be that the Iranians in this study really have no other reliable information available to them, or perhaps that they know the dangers of departing from the official line and are feeding it back for their own purposes – or both.
The current political controversy in Iran is not an invented fact. Thousands of people take great risks to go into the streets in opposition to the election and to the regime. Venerated clerics such as Ayatollah Montazeri have issued statements damning the regime for its behavior, at least 4,000 people have been arrested according to the Iranian government itself, and the trials of opposition figures have been on national television. Hundreds of newspapers have been closed over the past decade, and anyone who reads a paper would be aware of this. Yet the respondents to this study say, by a margin of more than 70 percent, that individuals are completely or somewhat free to “express controversial political views, without fear of being harassed or punished.”
The opposition movement is limited in size and probably in demographics. At a minimum, those who are active in the opposition and most conversant with the politics are using cell phones and computers. Those individuals appear to be under represented in this study.
There are also, unquestionably, loyal supporters of the regime and its policies – very likely a majority. Just as in the days of the shah, average citizens tend to keep their heads down and not join in demonstrations or political activism until the very end, when they are finally convinced that the opposition will win.
This very useful study appears to confirm what many would have suspected: that the propaganda machine of the regime and the well publicized threat of retaliation against those who risk speaking out are effective deterrents to organized political opposition. That is not going to change easily.
2 years ago • 113 notes
