HKU POP releases the latest rankings of political figuresBack

(1) The “HKU POP Site” (http://hkupop.pori.hk) run by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) of The University of Hong Kong continues to release the results of the “Joint-University Rolling Survey on 2017 Chief Executive Election Proposal” on a daily basis except weekends and holidays. According to the latest findings, for the survey conducted from May 11 to 15, 46% “supported” the government’s proposal on CE election of 2017, 40% “opposed” and 14% did not give a definite answer. For details please refer to the feature page at http://hkupop.pori.hk/english/features/jointUrollingSurvey. Please note that the data released to public has a time lag of four days. Moreover, due to sampling errors, when quoting the figures, journalists should refrain from reporting the decimal places of the percentage figures.

(2) To facilitate academic study and rational discussion, POP has already released for public examination some time ago via POP Site the raw data of all 72 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 1,029 Hong Kong people between May 8 and 14 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, Carrie Lam ranks 2nd while Leung Kwok-hung ranks 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 9 people remain on the “top 10” list, only James Tien who ranked 8th last time has fallen out of the list after dropping to the 21st position. He is replaced by Anson Chan who has gone up 4 positions from the 12th place to occupy the 8th 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 Leung Kwok-hung, Donald Tsang, Wong Yuk-man, Regina Ip and Leung Chun-ying 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 +/-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. 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 year-end 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, Donald Tsang and Anson Chan 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 mid-May, 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 57%, 32% and 31%. Tung Chee-hwa, Donald Tsang, Regina Ip and Jasper Tsang occupied the 4th to 7th places, with 24%, 23%, 22% and 21% of respondents naming them respectively. The 8th to 10th ranks fell to Anson Chan, Wong Yuk-man and Emily Lau respectively, and percentage of respondents who named these figures was 18% each. 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. The overall ranks of Donald Tsang and Wong Yuk-man come 2nd and 3rd respectively, with average rankings of 3.7 and 5.4. The overall ranks of Regina Ip and Leung Chun-ying come 4th and 5th respectively, with average rankings of 6.1. The overall ranks of Jasper Tsang, Henry Tang and Anson Chan come 6th to 8th with average rankings of 7.9, 9.5 and 9.8 respectively. The 9th and 10th overall ranks go to Albert Ho and Emily Lau, with corresponding average rankings of 11.5 and 11.7.

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 October 31 to November 5, 2014, while this survey was conducted from May 8 to 14, 2015. 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, Carrie Lam ranks 2nd while Leung Kwok-hung ranks 3rd. Compared to 6 months ago, 9 people remain on the ‘top 10’ list, only James Tien who ranked 8th last time has fallen out of the list after dropping to the 21st position. He is replaced by Anson Chan who has gone up 4 positions from the 12th place to occupy the 8th 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 Leung Kwok-hung, Donald Tsang, Wong Yuk-man, Regina Ip and Leung Chun-ying 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’.”