HKU POP releases the latest rankings of political figuresBack

(1) In light of numerous public requests received by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) of The University of Hong Kong asking us to conduct surveys on the current situation, POP has opened a new page at “PopCon” (http://popcon.hk) to let people suggest questions for general surveys of the Hong Kong public. Up to now 43 proposed questions and 13 email opinions have been received from citizens. POP has selected some of the proposed questions and is now conducting the survey. The preliminary result is expected to be released tomorrow (November 19, 2014) via “PopCon”, while the tables, charts and raw data will be uploaded onto the “HKU POP Site” (http://hkupop.pori.hk) next Tuesday (November 25, 2014). The questions asked in the survey include: “How much do you support or oppose the Occupy Movement initiated by students and citizens?”, “Should the Occupy Movement continue or stop?”, “Should the SAR government clear the occupied areas or leave them alone?” and “How genuine do you think the SAR government / Central government / student organizers of the Occupy Movement is in resolving the current standoff?”

(2) To facilitate academic study and rational discussion, POP has already released for public examination some time ago via the “HKU POP Site” (http://hkupop.pori.hk) the raw data of all 59 regular rating surveys of CE CY Leung, as well as the 181 regular rating surveys of former CE Donald Tsang and 239 regular rating surveys of former CE CH Tung, along with related demographics of respondents. Please follow normal academic standards when using or citing such data.

POP interviewed 1,008 Hong Kong people between October 31 and November 5 by means of a random telephone survey conducted by real interviewers. According to this latest survey, Leung Chun-ying is the most visible political figure in Hong Kong again, Carrie Lam ranks 2nd while Leung Kwok-hung ranks 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 8 people remain on the “top 10” list. Anson Chan and Martin Lee who ranked 2nd and 9th last time have both fallen out of the list after dropping 10 positions each. They are replaced by James Tien and Emily Lau who have gone up 16 positions and 4 positions from the 24th and 14th places to rank the 8th and 10th respectively. 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 Leung Kwok-hung, Donald Tsang, Wong Yuk-man, Regina Ip and Henry Tang 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. The maximum sampling error of percentages of people’s most familiar political figures is +/-3 percentage points at 95% confidence level. The response rate of this survey is 65%.

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 2014 mid-year 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 Tung Chee-hwa and Donald Tsang 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 from late October to early November, respondents could name, unaided, up to 10 political figures whom they knew best. Leung Chun-ying, Carrie Lam and Leung Kwok-hung were the top three. The corresponding percentages of respondents who named these figures were 36%, 31% and 27%. Regina Ip, Tung Chee-hwa, Wong Yuk-man and Jasper Tsang occupied the 4th to 7th places, with 23%, 21%, 20% and 20% of respondents naming them respectively. The 8th to 10th ranks fell to James Tien, Donald Tsang and Emily Lau respectively, and percentages of respondents who named these figures were 17%, 14% and 13%. 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, Leung Kwok-hung has the highest overall rank with an average ranking of 2.9. Donald Tsang has the 2nd highest overall rank with an average ranking of 3.3. The overall ranks of Wong Yuk-man and Regina Ip come 3rd and 4th respectively, with average rankings of 4.7 and 6.7. The overall ranks of Henry Tang and Jasper Tsang come 5th and 6th with average rankings of 7.9 and 8.3 respectively. The 7th to 10th overall ranks go to Leung Chun-ying, Anson Chan, Emily Lau and Albert Ho, with corresponding average rankings of 8.4, 9.9, 11.6 and 11.8.

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 22 to 30, 2014, while this survey was conducted from October 31 to November 5, 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 Chun-ying is the most visible political figure in Hong Kong again, Carrie Lam ranks 2nd while Leung Kwok-hung ranks 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 8 people remain on the ‘top 10’ list. Anson Chan and Martin Lee who ranked 2nd and 9th last time have both fallen out of the list after dropping 10 positions each. They are replaced by James Tien and Emily Lau who have gone up 16 positions and 4 positions from the 24th and 14th places to rank the 8th and 10th respectively. 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 Leung Kwok-hung, Donald Tsang, Wong Yuk-man, Regina Ip and Henry Tang 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’.”