HKU POP releases the latest rankings of political figuresBack

Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong interviewed 1,008 Hong Kong people between November 4 and 7 by means of a random telephone survey conducted by real interviewers. According to this latest survey, Leung Chun-ying continues to be the most visible political figure in Hong Kong, while Donald Tsang and Regina Ip rank 2nd and 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 8 people remain on the “top 10” list. Emily Lau and Lee Cheuk-yan who ranked 7th and 8th last time have fallen out of the list after dropping to the 16th and 14th positions. They are replaced by Regina Ip and Tung Chee-hwa who has gone up 8 positions each from the 11th and 14th places to occupy the 3rd and 6th places. The ups and downs within the latest list should be good reflections of our changing political environment. Tung Chee-hwa’s re-entering the list may be a reflection of people’s recent discussions on the performance of Chief Executives. If we would like to focus on long term development, we can use the overall rankings accumulated over five years. Figures show that Donald Tsang, Leung Kwok-hung, Wong Yuk-man, Henry Tang and Regina Ip are people’s most familiar political figures in the long run. It should be noted, however, that our ranking of “people’s most familiar political figures” is based on our surveys which requested respondents to name local political figures without prompting. This kind of familiarity measurement is not the same as prompted ratings. In other words, those high on the list may not be the most supported figures, while those lower down may have a different ranking if we use a prompting method. However, those who scored best in unprompted surveys are no doubt the most well-known political figures in Hong Kong. The maximum sampling error of percentages of people’s most familiar political figures is +/-4 percentage points at 95% confidence level. The response rate of this survey is 67%.

POP today releases on schedule via the POP Site the survey results of people’s most familiar political figures. As a general practice, all the figures have been weighted according to provisional figures obtained from the Census and Statistics Department regarding the gender-age distribution of the Hong Kong population in 2013 mid-year. Herewith the contact information of survey on people’s most familiar political figures:

This survey on people’s most familiar political figures has been conducted for many years, with results initially released through our publication POP Express until October 2006 when we began to release them online. Between 1994 and 2005, the survey was conducted and released in the form of “top 10 political figures” using our usual “top 10” or “top 5” series survey design, which involved both naming and rating stages. Starting from October 2005, we simplified our “top 10 political figures” survey by just recording and analyzing the “naming” results, because we have already developed over time numerous rating surveys covering CE, government officials, members of Legislative and Executive Councils, and so on. As for the rating part, we only conduct supplementary rating surveys to cover those listed in the top 10 political figures but not covered in other rating surveys. Take our latest survey as an example, our supplementary rating survey of Donald Tsang, Anson Chan, Tung Chee-hwa and Henry Tang will be conducted later and the results will be uploaded onto our POP Site in due course. Moreover, in our presentation of findings, different from the other “top 10” rating series, we introduced rankings from 1 to 50 for “people’s most familiar political figures”, as well as average accumulative rankings calculated from the past 10 surveys spanning over about five years, in order to indicate the ups-and-downs of these political figures in the long run. Please refer to our POP Site for details. Herewith the result of our latest survey on “people’s most familiar political figures”, other rankings beyond the “Top 10” can be found in the POP Site:

In our naming survey conducted in early November, respondents could name, unaided, up to 10 political figures whom they knew best. Leung Chun-ying, Donald Tsang and Regina Ip were the top three. The corresponding percentages of respondents who could name these figures were 62%, 32% and 30%. Leung Kwok-hung, Anson Chan, Tung Chee-hwa and Wong Yuk-man occupied the 4th to 7th places with corresponding recognition rates of 26%, 26%, 26% and 23%. The 8th to 10th ranks fell to Carrie Lam, Henry Tang and Jasper Tsang respectively. Their corresponding recognition rates were 20%, 18% and 18%. Please refer to the relevant table for the rest of the list. For easy reference, POP Site has already displayed the results of all naming surveys conducted since March 1997.

Herewith some of the results of our “people’s most familiar political figures” surveys accumulated over past 10 surveys spanning over about five years:

Based on the results of the past 10 surveys, Donald Tsang has the highest overall rank with an average ranking of 2.2. Leung Kwok-hung has the 2nd highest overall rank with an average ranking of 3.4. The overall ranks of Wong Yuk-man and Henry Tang come 3rd and 4th respectively, with average rankings of 4.0 and 5.3. The overall ranks of Regina Ip and Jasper Tsang come 5th and 6th with average rankings of 6.7 and 8.0 respectively. The 7th to 10th overall ranks go to Emily Lau, Anson Chan, Martin Lee and Lee Cheuk-yan, with corresponding average rankings of 10.6, 10.7, 10.8 and 11.0.

In January 2007, POP opened a feature page called "Opinion Daily" at the "POP Site", to record significant events and selected polling figures on a day-to-day basis, in order to let readers judge by themselves the reasons for the ups and downs of different opinion figures. In July 2007, POP collaborated with Wisers Information Limited whereby Wisers supplies to POP each day starting from July 24, a record of significant events of that day, according to the research method designed by POP. These daily entries would be uploaded to "Opinion Daily" as soon as they are verified by POP.

For the polling items covered in this press release, the previous survey was conducted from April 23 to May 1, 2013, while this survey was conducted from November 4 to 7, 2013. In between these two surveys, herewith the significant events selected from counting newspaper headlines and commentaries on a daily basis and covered by at least 25% of the local newspaper articles. Readers can make their own judgment if these significant events have any impacts to different polling figures.

Robert Ting-Yiu Chung, Director of Public Opinion Programme, observed, “The purpose of our ranking of political figures is to show the changing political ecology by studying the ups and downs of people’s familiarity with these figures over time. According to our latest survey, Leung Chun-ying continues to be the most visible political figure in Hong Kong, while Donald Tsang and Regina Ip rank 2nd and 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 8 people remain on the ‘top 10’ list. Emily Lau and Lee Cheuk-yan who ranked 7th and 8th last time have fallen out of the list after dropping to the 16th and 14th positions. They are replaced by Regina Ip and Tung Chee-hwa who has gone up 8 positions each from the 11th and 14th places to occupy the 3rd and 6th places. The ups and downs within the latest list should be good reflections of our changing political environment. Tung Chee-hwa’s re-entering the list may be a reflection of people’s recent discussions on the performance of Chief Executives. If we would like to focus on long term development, we can use the overall rankings accumulated over five years. Figures show that Donald Tsang, Leung Kwok-hung, Wong Yuk-man, Henry Tang and Regina Ip are people’s most familiar political figures in the long run. It should be noted, however, that our ranking of ‘people’s most familiar political figures’ is based on our surveys which requested respondents to name local political figures without prompting. This kind of familiarity measurement is not the same as prompted ratings. In other words, those high on the list may not be the most supported figures, while those lower down may have a different ranking if we use a prompting method. However, those who scored best in unprompted surveys are no doubt the most well-known political figures in Hong Kong. As for the reasons affecting the ups and downs of these rankings, we leave it to our readers to form their own judgment using the detailed records displayed in our ‘Opinion Daily’.”