Camelia Pasandaran & Ferry Irwanto – The recent release of survey results from polling institutions linked to political campaign teams has brought into sharp focus the purpose behind the poll results.

The various surveys, which were dutifully reported by many media organizations that failed to question links between the polling institutions and specific campaign teams, all place incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in front of the pack, but by wildly varying extents.

In "Bandwagons, Underdogs, the Titanic and the Red Cross: The Influence of Public Opinion Polls on Voters," authors Galen A. Irwin and Joop J.M. van Holsteyn argue that in terms of election surveys, other than the pollster's credibility, there are two important themes; namely, the bandwagon effect and the underdog effect, which both influence voter behavior.

The book, published in 2000, defines the bandwagon effect as being closely related to opportunism, where people often do and believe things because many others are doing the same.

The underdog effect, in contrast, occurs mainly when people vote out of sympathy for the party perceived to be losing the electio n.

Though the book argues that there is less empirical evidence for the existence of the latter effect, Yudhoyono's case provides a classic example in the Indonesian context after his 2004 victory over now bitter rival Megawati Sukarnoputri.

The popularity of Yudhoyono, who at the time was perceived as a having just an outside chance of securing the presidency, soared after he resigned from Megawati's cabinet and her husband, Taufik Kiemas, labeled the soon-to-be president a "crying boy."

This time around, the polls – described by The Australian newspaper as "largely the result of a small group of US-educated social scientists with an entrepreneurial bent seeing a gap in the market" – fall into two camps: The first predicts that Yudhoyono will win the election in the first round on July 8, while the second camp claims the election will be a close-run event and will be decided in a second round of voting in September.

It is not difficult to determine which of the surveys have been funded by which campaign teams.

In what was an embarrassing admission, Indonesia's largest polling organization, the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI), was recently forced to acknowledge that it had received a not insignificant Rp 500 million ($50,000) from Fox Indonesia for a poll that concluded that Yudhoyono and running mate Boediono would romp home in the first round with 70 percent of the vote. Rivals Megawati and Vice President Jusuf Kalla received 18 and 7 percent, respectively.

Dodi Ambardi, research director at LSI, admitted after releasing the survey at a packed press conference that the survey had been commissioned by Fox Indonesia, a campaign consultant working on behalf of the president's re-election campaign team.

The LSI, which had previously denied any association with political parties, was not influenced by the money, Dodi claimed.

The revelation was quickly followed by a survey from the Information Research Council (LRI), which claimed that Yudhoyono and Boediono's lead was not as large as many believed, with the favorites polling at 33 percent, marginally ahead of Kalla and running mate Wiranto on 29.3 percent and Megawati and Prabowo Subianto on 21 percent.

LRI is owned by Johan Silalahi, a political consultant linked to Kalla's campaign.

On the surface, the poll suggests that the presidential election will go to a second round, with both Yudhoyono and his discarded vice president going head-to-head in September, as Kalla the underdog closes in on his boss.

Johan denied that his association with Kalla had anything to do with the result. "If the election, under fair conditions, concludes in only one round, I will happily close my polling institute," Johan told reporters.

But the polling wars didn't end there. Last week, the Institute of Economic and Social Studies and Development (LP3ES) released a poll stating that Yudhoyono and Boediono would garner 54.9 percent of the vote, Megawati and Prabowo 9.7 percent, and Kalla and Wiranto 6.8 percent.

However, Fajar Nursahid, LP3ES's research director, conceded that the telephone survey didn't accurately reflect the nation's voters. "We only conducted the survey in 15 big cities," Fajar said. "The results cannot be claimed as the nationwide opinion on the candidates."

This poor state of affairs came to the fore when the three polling bodies admitted during a rancorous panel discussion that some of their surveys had been skewed by inaccurate sampling.

"As we admitted during the survey release, our sample validation is a bit problematic," Johan told the audience, acknowledging that the LRI's sampling didn't match the demographic data of the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) on voter education levels or rural versus urban composition.

That didn't stop him from attacking the LSI, claiming that it was trying to ensure the election would be decided in one round, which would benefit the incumbent.

In response, Dodi Ambardi denied that LSI had used questions that led respondents to choose Yudhoyono, and said that LRI's research had significant problems with its methodology and sampling.

Burhanuddin Muhtadi, a senior researcher at LSI, later said that the accuracy of the LSI results was supported by other pollsters such as the Indonesian Survey Circle and Reform Institute.

Bima Arya Sugiarto, a political analyst from Paramadina University in Jakarta, highlighted another problem. "It's not only about who paid those pollsters to do the polling, but also did the pollster really conduct the polling?" he said, further undermining the credibility of the survey institutions, which are a relatively new phenomenon here but have a long history internationally.

A poll conducted in 1824 in the United States by The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian newspaper, which showed Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the US presidential race, is believed to have been the pioneer of election polling.

While the newspaper's poll remained local, in 1916 the Literary Digest established a national poll and correctly predicted Woodrow Wilson's victory in the US presidential contest.

The weekly magazine then successfully predicted the winner of the following four presidential races by mailing out millions of postcards to readers and asking them to return them with their predictions.

Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, a senior researcher at the Jakarta-based Danareksa Research Institute, said that funding was vital to polling institutions in order to finance the costs of survey operations.

According to Yudhi, surveying people over the phone is an inexpensive polling method, but is also inherently flawed because respondents who have telephones are generally wealthier than those without, therefore creating skewed results.

"A pollster might rely on its client donations to finance the operational costs, but it should still capture the reality on the ground, rather than just trying to make its client happy," Yudhi said on Wednesday when asked about the contradictory polls released by LSI and LRI.

As an illustration, Yudhi said, a monthly survey conducted by Danareksa involving 1,700 households in six provinces cost the institute more than Rp 100 million ($10,000). The Reform Institute said it had cost Rp 250 million for it to conduct a survey on the presidential election.

Yudhi said that many pollsters tended to ignore research principles and to release results in line with their clients' wishes.

Yudhi said that when undertaking a client-funded poll, a survey institution might not reveal the identity of its client to the survey respondents, because that information could influence the results.

"The good pollsters are not driven by their client's interests. That's why you can't hire just any sort of person to conduct a survey anywhere," he said, adding that a survey sample's criteria was also highly influential in determining the final results.