HKU POP releases the latest rankings of political figuresBack

To facilitate academic study and rational discussion, the Public Opinion Programme (POP) of The University of Hong Kong has already released for public examination some time ago via the “HKU POP Site” (http://hkupop.pori.hk) the raw data of all 46 regular rating surveys of CE CY Leung, along with related demographics of respondents. POP today releases the raw data of the 181 regular rating surveys of former CE Donald Tsang. Please follow normal academic standards when using or citing such data. POP intends to extend the release to cover the raw data of about 250 regular rating surveys of former CE CH Tung in a few weeks. Please stay tuned.

• Download dataset : Rating surveys of former CE Donald Tsang

POP interviewed 1,032 Hong Kong people between April 22 and 30 by means of a random telephone survey conducted by real interviewers. According to this latest survey, Leung Kwok-hung becomes the most visible political figure in Hong Kong for the first time, while Anson Chan and Leung Chun-ying rank 2nd and 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 9 people remain on the “top 10” list, only Henry Tang who ranked 9th last time has fallen out of the list after dropping to the 13th position. He is replaced by Martin Lee who has gone up 9 positions from the 18th place to occupy the 9th place. The ups and downs within the latest list should be good reflections of our changing political environment. 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 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 66%.

POP today releases on schedule via the POP Site the survey results of people’s most familiar political figures. From 2014, POP enhanced the previous simple weighting method based on age and gender distribution to “rim weighting” based on age, gender and education (highest level attended) distribution. The latest figures released today have been rim-weighted according to provisional figures obtained from the Census and Statistics Department regarding the gender-age distribution of the Hong Kong population in mid-year 2013 and the educational attainment (highest level attended) distribution collected in the 2011 Census. 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 Anson Chan, Donald Tsang, Tung Chee-hwa and Martin Lee 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 late April, respondents could name, unaided, up to 10 political figures whom they knew best. Leung Kwok-hung, Anson Chan and Leung Chun-ying were the top three. The corresponding percentages of respondents who could name these figures were 28%, 28% and 25%. Donald Tsang and Regina Ip occupied the 4th and 5th places with corresponding recognition rates of 23% and 21%. The 6th to 10th ranks fell to Tung Chee-hwa, Carrie Lam, Jasper Tsang, Martin Lee and Wong Yuk-man respectively. Their corresponding recognition rates were 19%, 19%, 18%, 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 2.5. Leung Kwok-hung has the 2nd highest overall rank with an average ranking of 3.3. The overall ranks of Wong Yuk-man and Henry Tang come 3rd and 4th respectively, with average rankings of 4.7 and 6.0. The overall ranks of Regina Ip and Jasper Tsang come 5th and 6th with average rankings of 6.7 and 8.1 respectively. The 7th to 10th overall ranks go to Anson Chan, Martin Lee, Leung Chun-ying and Emily Lau, with corresponding average rankings of 9.6, 10.6, 11.4 and 11.6.

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 November 4 to 7, 2013, while this survey was conducted from April 22 to 30, 2014. 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 Kwok-hung becomes the most visible political figure in Hong Kong for the first time, while Anson Chan and Leung Chun-ying rank 2nd and 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 9 people remain on the ‘top 10’ list, only Henry Tang who ranked 9th last time has fallen out of the list after dropping to the 13th position. He is replaced by Martin Lee who has gone up 9 positions from the 18th place to occupy the 9th place. The ups and downs within the latest list should be good reflections of our changing political environment. 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 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’.”