Public opinion polls are not a political forecast, but they primarily serve to define a communication strategy to win new voters. Therefore, serious agencies have agreements with clients not to publish these polls, says for Novi Magazin Srdjan Bogosavljevic, director of Ipsos Strategic Marketing.
“It is unwise to spend resources on research for your own needs and then to disclose the results to the opponents – and even our own weaknesses. Our role as researchers is to see what is wrong with the client, not that to make the promotional material out of it. It is important to understand that the researches are footages of the moment and that what is true today will not apply immediately before the elections because by that time voters will decide for whom to vote. We have good results in what we do and satisfied customers,” – says Bogosavljević and adds:
“The polls conducted before the elections produce results that are very similar to those obtained on the actual elections. The trouble is that the results “leak” to the public without any methodological explanation and without the date to which they refer. It would be good if the media had a code not to publish the researches under the name of an agency without the authorization of that agency. In the world, including our region – Croatia and Macedonia, researches are made only to get a forecast, and they are usually ordered by the media. These surveys are focused on the rating of the parties and, possibly, leaders.”
You conduct researches for numerous clients. How do you remain neutral?
Just like in market researches where we often work for competitors – by allocating different teams that do not inform each other on their actions. Examination of political public opinion is a small part of our job and we are by far the largest company in the Balkans and large enough that we can hire different people to work for various clients.
Let’s get back to pre-election trends. Who can constitute the parliament?
The political scene in Serbia has two major forces – the Democratic Party and the Serbian Progressive Party and current measurements of public opinion show that these two parties will probably have more than 60 percent of the votes. If either of these two drops below 24 percent, it will be a failure.
Will personnel have crucial role? Besides president Dragan Djilas, DS also has Dragan Sutanovac, Dusan Petrovic, Bojan Pajtic … It seems that SNS does not have a strong response.
SNS has two strong leaders who are always among the five most popular politicians, and Tomislav Nikolic is often rated the best. Whether you are choosing a most trusted politician, or you are having a dilemma whom would citizens choose for the president – Tomislav Nikolic is the only one who stands out besides Boris Tadic. Aleksandar Vucic is also very present in public and quite often we hear of some public figure who joined SNS.
There is no doubt that the opposition always finds it easier to criticize the government than the government to defend itself, even with global crisis as an alibi.
The Democratic Party came to power at the time when all the parameters in Serbia were at their peak, but the global economic crisis that occurred at that time canceled the chances of development. Since October 2009. wages are continuously declining, unemployment is growing and we have departure of U.S. Steel as a result of the crisis. Increased unemployment is logical result of a lack of investment and reduced economic activity both in the country and the world.