HKU POP SITE releases the latest ratings of CE Tung Chee-hwa <br>and Principal Officials under the accountability systemBack

The Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong today releases on schedule via the "HKU POP SITE" (http://hkupop.pori.hk) the latest ratings of CE Tung Chee-hwa and Principal Officials under the accountability system. POP's normal practice is to release the results of our regular surveys every Tuesday at 2 pm via our POP Site, except during public holidays, each time with a forecast of the items to be released in the forthcoming week. We will review and adjust this operation regularly.

According to our schedule, the date and time of our next release will be August 20, 2002, Tuesday, at 2 pm, the latest ratings of the top ten Legislative Councillors will be released.

According to the survey findings released today, CE Tung Chee-hwa's rating registered in early August (August 2-7) was 48.0 marks, a drop of 2.1 marks from that of mid-July. The figure has dropped continuously for three times since the end of June, and was also the lowest in the past ten months. Meanwhile, the popularity ratings of CS Donald Tsang Yam-kuen and FS Antony Leung Kam-chung were 61.4 and 55.5 marks respectively, representing drops of 1.6 and 3.7 marks from those registered in mid-July. The popularity rating of SJ Elsie Leung Oi-sie has also decreased slightly by 0.4 mark to become 50.1 marks, but the drop was statistically insignificant.

As regards the popularity ranking of Directors of Bureaux, because it is POP's long established practice not to treat ratings of persons with less than 50% benchmark recognition rate as representative, only 8 out of 11 Directors of Bureaux can be meaningfully discussed in this survey, and they have been listed separately in our summary tables. According to our latest findings, the three most popular officials were Secretary for Security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, Secretary for Education and Manpower Arthur Li Kwok-cheung and Secretary for Economic Development and Labour Stephen Ip Shu-kwan, attaining 61.4, 56.0 and 55.5 marks respectively. Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food Yeoh Eng-kiong and Secretary for Housing, Planning and Lands Michael Suen Ming-yeung ranked fourth and fifth, with popularity ratings of 55.4 and 54.0 marks respectively. The remaining three ranks went to Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology Henry Tang Ying-yen, Secretary for the Civil Service Joseph Wong Wing-ping and Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Frederick Ma Si-hang, attaining 52.9, 50.8 and 42.3 marks respectively. Since the remaining directors failed to reach the 50% benchmark recognition rate, their ratings are not taken as representative.

The new survey reported in the POP Site today is a random telephone survey conducted by interviewers, targeting at Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong of age 18 or above. The sample size of the survey is over 1,000 respondents. At 95% confidence level, the sampling errors of the ratings of CE, CS, FS and SJ are plus/minus 1.2, 1.0, 1.0 and 1.2 marks respectively, while that of the ratings of Directors of Bureaux with recognition rates reaching 50% is less than plus/minus 1.6 marks. That means if we were to repeat a certain survey 100 times, using the same questions each time but with different random samples, we would expect 95 times getting a figure within the error margins specified. Shall anyone have any question regarding the research design of the surveys published in the POP Site, members of the POP Team will be happy to answer them, but we will not comment on the findings at this stage. Such an arrangement would be reviewed when more resources are available. Please note that Dr CHUNG Ting-yiu Robert, Director of Public Opinion Programme, is solely responsible for the work published in the POP Site, which does not represent the stand of the University of Hong Kong.