Marcos may be in worse shape

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s disapproval rating of 44 percent as of September, as reported by the PulseAsia pollster, may actually be worse, and may have even touched 20 percent more — the level former president Estrada had which, together with massive demonstrations, gave the military establishment the excuse to tell him to resign.

Political scientists have long known what pollsters rarely admit: when the subject is a head of state, approval ratings are systematically inflated — by as much as 10 to 20 percentage points. Or applied inversely, becomes deflated, which means roughly that much worse scores in his disapproval ratings to correct because of that bias.

That is, if Pulse Asia reported that 44 percent disapproved of Marcos’ performance, his actual rating would be 10 to 20 percentage points more, 54 to 64 points — a loud get-out-of-there-now number.

The distortion doesn’t come from arithmetic; it comes from fear and social deference — the invisible forces that shape what citizens say when the State is listening.

In weak institutional environments, people learn caution. Many Filipinos, seeing a surveyor with an official badge, instinctively “play safe.” This is authoritarian response bias — the tendency to overstate approval for fear of reprisal.

Comparative studies in Russia, Turkey and Southeast Asia show exaggerations of 7 to 12 points. In Russia, Egypt and China, the “fear bias” adds 10 to 20 points to leaders’ approval.

In Latin American studies (Chile 1970s, Venezuela 2000s), the range is 5 to 12 points. In the Philippines, where most interviews are done face-to-face, the bump can reach 10 to 15 points. Filipinos are famously courteous. Even dissent is expressed politely, if at all. Even just the address “President” induces a more favorable view.

Pulse Asia and the other major pollster, SWS, rely mainly on door-to-door interviews. Enumerators — students or contractors — sit in respondents’ living rooms with clipboards. The atmosphere is respectful but intimidating. Respondents nod, smile, and say “yes.”

That “living-room effect” adds 5 to 7 points of politeness inflation. Anonymous telephone or SMS polls typically yield lower approvals and more undecided answers because respondents feel safer being honest.

Even mature democracies show a head-of-state premium: people defer to the office, not necessarily the person. In hierarchical societies like ours, this cultural reflex contributes another 4 to 6 points of goodwill.

Add the four factors together — fear, politeness, personal contact and respect — and overall inflation can reach 10 to 20 percentage points. A published 33 approval percent rating for the incumbent president may mask a real situation of only 13 to 23 percent now approving Marcos performance. That means only a minority supports Marcos now.

Survey

Survey organizations rarely acknowledge bias. Sponsors prefer clean numbers; caveats complicate headlines. Yet insiders quietly apply “deflator coefficients” when advising private clients, trimming about 10 points from public results.

What however reduces the fear-or-respect bias, and results in a drastic jump in disapproval for a sitting president is when a political crisis erupts, as in the cases of President Cory Aquino, when her net satisfaction rating dropped from an average of 57 points in 1988 to 7 in 1989, in the wake of the coup attempts against her; President Ramos from over 50s in the previous years to just one point in October 1995 as Filipinos blamed him for the execution of OFW Flor Contemplacion in Singapore; Estrada in March 2000 as a result of Gov. Chavit Singson’s expose on him as receiver of jueteng bribes which pushed his net satisfaction rating to 5 points; and Aquino 3rd, to 11 points in March 2015 from the 38 in previous months because of the Mamasapano massacre.

Worse for a president hit by a crisis, the ratings, like inflation, are “sticky.” It takes time for people to forget their disapproval, if ever.

Polls are thermometers, not truths. But when respondents fear the doctor, even the thermometer lies. In our culture of politeness and hierarchy, the warmth measured is often a fever of fear and respect, not genuine admiration.

The banker and the Trotskyite

It was hilarious for columnist CuUnjieng (I follow his practice of not mentioning the first name of a disliked person being written about) to invoke “historian” Joseph Scalice, saying that he agrees with him (Scalice) that I “twist and distort” their blah-blahs.

It’s another evidence that CuUnjieng is not the empiricist who writes based on hard data. Scalice is not just a “historian”; he is a legend in his own mind who passionately believes he is resurrecting, late in his life, the ideas of Marxist Leon Trotsky in the world communist movement. Although he got his PhD at University of California in Berkeley, he moved to a land run by Maoists — Trotskyites’ hated enemy — to be an assistant professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University. I hope he’s a Christian Trotskyite, if there’s such a creature.

Isn’t it hilarious that CuUnjieng, an agent of what Lenin called the advanced stage of capitalism — finance capital — is in agreement with probably the last Trotskyite on this planet, in condemning me as distorting their views. I can’t imagine how they conversed, with CuUnjieng claiming how the Maharlika Investment Fund would succeed, and Scalice explaining why the Communist Party of the Philippines failed because it was a Stalinist party.

I wrote on my Facebook page two years ago — in passing, as I have no interest in Trotsky nor in Scalice — that Trotskyism’s main idea that socialism cannot succeed in one country alone, has been disproven by the rise of China as the coming world power, and more recently by Vietnam. I didn’t bother to respond to Scalice’s angry reply, as nobody really was interested in it.

Scalice actually wrote two earthshaking little-founded claims about two very respected personalities in his doctoral dissertation that was the basis for his book “Drama of a Dictatorship: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines.” Relatives of these two people that I knew personally should debunk his claims.

He wrote in his dissertation:

“The other figure associated with the rebirth of the Communist Party in late 1962 was Ignacio Lacsina, a labor lawyer who rapidly climbed the ranks of trade union politics in the 1950s and 1960s to become one of its dominant players. A pugnacious, ambitious and untrustworthy man, he was working as an informant for the CIA (the US Central Intelligence Agency) at the time that he was made a member of the executive committee of the Communist Party. By the late 1960s, he had become a reliable informant for Marcos, supplying him with names and details regarding the student radicals of the Kabataang Makabayan.

“Long after having established his credentials as the leading left figure in the Philippine labor movement, Lacsina continued to secretly inform the US Embassy of developments within this movement and within the left generally. He was assigned political handlers at the embassy; he now rarely met with the labor attaché, but was in routine secret communication with H.L.T. Koren, the embassy political affairs counselor. In March 1961, for example, Lacsina supplied information to Koren regarding the intended visit to Manila of CPUSA attorney Vincent Hallinan on behalf of William and Celia Pomeroy. Lacsina also provided information to the embassy on the PKP support network, ‘Friends of the Pomeroys.’ Koren was a CIA man in the State Department. From Manila, he was assigned to head counter-insurgency in the Congo in the mid-1960s, where he led a vicious operation suppressing the population.”

Scalice also disparaged the late nationalist senator Jose Diokno, a much-revered figure in Philippine history, a hero for most Filipinos that he is universally referred to endearingly as “Ka Pepe”:

“Stung by his justice secretary’s betrayal, Macapagal removed Diokno to retain Diokno as his justice secretary [ojo!! Doesn’t make sense.] The Stonehill affair brought Jose Diokno into the limelight as a fighter against corruption, and he would become a longstanding and key political ally of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines. In September 1962, SCAUP [a communist front in the 1960s at the University of the Philippines] sponsored an event at the UP College of Law for Diokno to speak on the implications of the Stonehill case, during which Diokno stated that there was a ‘moral rot’ among Filipinos which was ‘evident in the Stonehill case where Americans and not Filipinos had the guts to come out in the open to help the Philippine government topple down the vast Stonehill empire. What was unstated was that Diokno’s ‘anti-corruption’ drive was carried out, not with help from, but on the orders of, Washington and the CIA. Diokno’s ties to the CIA were never severed. In 1973, shortly after being arrested by Marcos, Diokno instructed his sister, Caridad Santos, to write to Edward Lansdale to appeal for assistance, and he provided Santos with Lansdale’s home address.”

I’ll have to check if Scalice included these accusations in his book, as I still have to order it from the Ateneo Press.

PS

I get it. CuUnjieng last year wrote three pieces on the Maharlika Investment Fund, and even claimed I know nothing about international money laundering, when I wrote that the fund could become a venue for it. Then last July, he was appointed director of the Fund. Is he sending the message that he’s interested in joining the BSP? Best of luck, CuUnjieng. The owners of this paper must be proud that it’s become some kind of stepping stone, as another columnist quite surprisingly became vice chairman of a government-owned company whose line of business he knows about as much as he knows Greek.

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Marcos may be in worse shape
Source: Breaking News PH