HKU POP releases the latest rankings of political figuresBack

“South Korean Presidential Election 2012 Guessing Game” launched

The “PopCon” e-platform (http://popcon.hk) hosted by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong launched a new game called “South Korean Presidential Election 2012 Guessing Game” last week. Users can now make guesses on the vote share of the South Korean Presidential Election due to take place on December 19 this year, in order to earn credits and win prizes. Guessing figures will be released real time until the last minute of the game (i.e. 23:59 on December 18). Over 308 guesses have been received so far and the accumulated Popcoins reaches 57,375. The latest situation is Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in leading the other 5 candidates by a large margin, with 36% and 33% of vote share respectively. Besides, POP is recruiting a team of “Friends of POP” to demonstrate civil power. “Friends of POP” will be invited to participate in supporting various research activities organized by POP, including civil referendums (PopVote 3.23 mobilized about 300 citizens), election exit polls (LC election studies mobilized about 250), rally head-counting (July 1st rally mobilized about 50), as well as facilitating online research. The first round of recruitment will end on December 31, 2012. Interested citizens are welcome to register at “PopCon” e-platform.

POP interviewed 1,001 Hong Kong people between November 20 and 28 by means of a random telephone survey conducted by real interviewers. Leung Chun-ying continues to be the most visible political figure in Hong Kong, while Wong Yuk-man and Leung Kwok-hung rank 2nd and 3rd. Compared to 4 months ago, 9 people remain on the ‘top 10’ list. John Tsang who ranked 10th last time has fallen out of the list after dropping 6 places to become 16th. He is replaced by Lee Cheuk-yan who has risen 3 positions from the 13th place to occupy the 10th place. The ups and downs within the list are good reflections of our changing political environment. If we would like to study long term development, then using overall rankings accumulated over five years would be more appropriate. Figures show that Donald Tsang, Leung Kwok-hung, Henry Tang, Regina Ip and Wong Yuk-man 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. 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 64%.

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 2012 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 and Henry Tang will be conducted later and the results will be uploaded onto our POP Site after 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-November, respondents could name, unaided, up to 10 political figures whom they knew best. Leung Chun-ying, Wong Yuk-man and Leung Kwok-hung were the top three. The corresponding percentages of respondents who could name these figures were 66%, 33% and 33%. Carrie Lam, Donald Tsang and Regina Ip occupied the 4th and 6th places with corresponding recognition rates of 30%, 26% and 24%. The 7th to 10th ranks fell to Albert Ho, Jasper Tsang, Henry Tang and Lee Cheuk-yan respectively. Their corresponding recognition rates were 23%, 20%, 17% and 15%. 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 1.8. Leung Kwok-hung has the 2nd highest overall rank with an average ranking of 4.1. The overall ranks of Henry Tang and Regina Ip come 3rd and 4th respectively, with average rankings of 5.0 and 6.7. The overall ranks of Wong Yuk-man and Jasper Tsang come 5th and 6th with average rankings of 7.9 and 8.5 respectively. The 7th to 10th overall ranks go to Martin Lee, Emily Lau, Audrey Eu and Anson Chan, with corresponding average rankings of 8.7, 9.6, 10.5 and 11.1.

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 July 17 to 20, 2012 while this survey was conducted from November 20 to 28, 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, “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 Wong Yuk-man and Leung Kwok-hung rank 2nd and 3rd. Compared to 4 months ago, 9 people remain on the ‘top 10’ list. John Tsang who ranked 10th last time has fallen out of the list after dropping 6 places to become 16th. He is replaced by Lee Cheuk-yan who has risen 3 positions from the 13th place to occupy the 10th place. The ups and downs within the list are good reflections of our changing political environment. If we would like to study long term development, then using overall rankings accumulated over five years would be more appropriate. Figures show that Donald Tsang, Leung Kwok-hung, Henry Tang, Regina Ip and Wong Yuk-man 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’.”

• December 11, 2012 (Tuesday) 1pm to 2pm: Popularity of CE and Principal Officials