HKU POP releases the latest ratings of the Top 10 Legislative CouncillorsBack

Minor errors have been detected in some figures in the original release, causing a swap in position of Tam Yiu-chung and Albert Chan. They are revised with an apology. Please click here to see the original version.

The Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong has uploaded two full sets of video record of the July 1 Rally onto the "PopCon" e-platform (http://popcon.hk). People can download the videos from the "July 1 Rally Feature page", and do their own headcount of the Rally. Video clips at higher resolutions are also available for purchase at production cost. Details available at the feature page.

POP conducted a double stage survey on the rating of Legislative Councillors in early and mid July, by means of random telephone surveys conducted by real interviewers. Our latest surveys show that compared to three months ago, in terms of familiarity, Tam Yiu-chung who occupied the eighth position last time has dropped out of the list, replaced by Albert Chan. In terms of absolute ratings, except that of Wong Yuk-man has gone up significantly by 4.2 marks, the ratings of most of the others have dropped. Those registered significant drops in ratings beyond sampling error include Regina Ip, Albert Ho, Jasper Tsang, Lee Cheuk-yan and Emily Lau, down by 6.6, 5.0, 3.5, 3.0 and 2.3 marks respectively. In terms of relative rankings, Audrey Eu moves up one place to re-take the top position after July last year, Jasper Tsang goes down one place to rank second. Alan Leong goes up three positions to rank fourth. Albert Ho goes down three places to rank seventh. Wong Yuk-man and Leung Kwok-hung swap positions to rank ninth and tenth respectively, while the relative rankings of all others remaining on the list have not changed. It should be noted however that our list of 'top 10' only includes Legco members who are best known to the public, ranked according to their support ratings. Some of the other 50 councillors may well have very high or low support ratings, but because they are not the most well-known councillors, they do not appear on the 'top 10' list by design. The maximum sampling errors of the ratings registered fall between +/-1.8 and +/-2.5 at 95% confidence level, while the response rate of the rating survey is 66%.

Points to note:
[1] The address of the "HKU POP SITE" is http://hkupop.pori.hk, journalists can check out the details of the survey there.
[2] The sample size of the first stage naming survey is 1,000 successful interviews, not 1,000 x 69.1% response rate, while that of the second stage rating survey is 1,015 successful interviews, not 1,015 x 66.2% response rate.
[3] "95% confidence level" means that 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. Media can state "sampling error of various ratings not more than +/-2.5 at 95% confidence level" when quoting the rating figures.
[4] When quoting the rating figures of this survey, one decimal place can be used, in order to match the precision level of the figures.
[5] The data of this survey is collected by means of random telephone interviews conducted by real interviewers, not by any interactive voice system (IVS). If a research organization uses "computerized random telephone survey" to camouflage its IVS operation, it should be considered unprofessional.

POP today releases on schedule via the "POP SITE" the latest popularity figures of the top ten Legislative Councillors. As a general practice, all 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 2011 year-end. Herewith the contact information:

The research design of our "Top 10 Legislative Councillors" has been explained in detail under "Survey Method" in our corresponding web page. The top councillors listed in our latest survey were all those who obtained the highest unprompted mentions in our first stage naming survey conducted in early July. In that survey, respondents could name, unaided, up to 10 legislators whom they knew best. As a result, Wong Yuk-man, Leung Kwok-hung, Regina Ip, Albert Ho and Albert Chan were mentioned most frequently. Please refer to the relevant table for the rest of the list. Those 12 who were named most frequently then entered into the second stage rating survey. During the second stage rating survey conducted in mid July, respondents were asked to rate each legislator in turn using a 0-100 scale. 0 indicates absolutely no support, 100 indicates absolute support, and 50 means half-half. After calculation, the bottom 2 legislators in terms of recognition rate were dropped; the remaining 10 were then ranked according to their support ratings attained to become the top 10 Legislative Councillors. For easy reference, the POP Site has already displayed the results of all naming surveys conducted since the year 1998. Recent ratings of top 10 Legislative Councillors are summarized below:

The latest survey showed that Audrey Eu was the most popularly supported councillor attaining 57.4 marks. Jasper Tsang, Regina Ip, Alan Leong and Emily Lau ranked the 2nd to 5th with 55.5, 51.9, 51.5 and 51.0 marks correspondingly. The 6th to 8th ranks went to Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho and Albert Chan who attained 50.0, 48.8 and 36.6 marks respectively. Wong Yuk-man and Leung Kwok-hung ranked the 9th to 10th, attaining 35.3 and 34.3 marks respectively. The mean score obtained by the top 5 councillors was 53.5 marks, while that for the top 10 was 47.2 marks. For this latest survey, Tam Yiu-chung and Tanya Chan obtained support ratings of 47.1 and 49.9 marks respectively, but they were dropped due to their relatively low recognition rates. The overall ratings ranked according to results obtained over the past 12 calendar months are tabulated as follows:

The overall rankings in the past 12 months showed that 9 Legislative Councillors have been on the list for four times. They are Regina Ip in the top rank achieving an average rating of 57.6 marks, Audrey Eu, Jasper Tsang, Emily Lau, Alan Leong, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho who ranked the 2nd to 7th and attained 56.6, 56.5, 52.7, 52.4, 52.0 and 50.9 marks correspondingly. Leung Kwok-hung and Wong Yuk-man ranked the 8th and 9th, with a respective of 32.6 and 31.9 marks. Tam Yiu-chung has been on the list for two times, attaining 52.0 marks on average, and ranked the 10th. James To and Albert Chan has been on the list for one time and ranked the 11th and 12th attaining 55.4 and 36.3 marks respectively.

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 provide readers with accurate information so that they can 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 since July 24 each day a record of significant events of that day, according to the research method designed by POP. These daily entries would be uploaded to the "Opinion Daily" feature page as soon as they are verified by POP.

For the polling items covered in this press release, the previous survey was conducted from 24 April to 2 May, 2012 while this survey was conducted from 12 to 19 July, 2012. 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, "Compared to three months ago, in terms of familiarity, Tam Yiu-chung who occupied the eighth position last time has dropped out of the list, replaced by Albert Chan. In terms of absolute ratings, except that of Wong Yuk-man has gone up significantly by 4.2 marks, the ratings of most of the others have dropped. Those registered significant drops in ratings beyond sampling error include Regina Ip, Albert Ho, Jasper Tsang, Lee Cheuk-yan and Emily Lau, down by 6.6, 5.0, 3.5, 3.0 and 2.3 marks respectively. In terms of relative rankings, Audrey Eu moves up one place to re-take the top position after July last year, Jasper Tsang goes down one place to rank second. Alan Leong goes up three positions to rank fourth. Albert Ho goes down three places to rank seventh. Wong Yuk-man and Leung Kwok-hung swap positions to rank ninth and tenth respectively, while the relative rankings of all others remaining on the list have not changed. It should be noted however that our list of 'top 10' only includes Legco members who are best known to the public, ranked according to their support ratings. Some of the other 50 councillors may well have very high or low support ratings, but because they are not the most well-known councillors, they do not appear on the 'top 10' list by design. We leave it for our readers to figure out the reasons for the ups and downs of these popularity ratings using detailed records shown in our 'Opinion Daily' feature page."

• July 31, 2012 (Tuesday) 1pm to 2pm: Popularity of CE and SAR Government, as well as the latest PSI figures