Aspoň káva #70 aneb Průzkumy, průzkumy, průzkumy

At least coffee 70, or Polls, polls, polls
Public opinion polls are certainly a good thing. They can be used to identify various needs, requirements, and marketing issues. They can also reveal a willingness to change certain established values, such as replacing the koruna with the euro. And last but not least, they can reveal the popularity of certain politicians or institutions and the preferences of individual political parties that would like to get their hands on the trough. Otherwise, the current government can only be described as a bunch of pigs slurping at full troughs. Troughs that are filled with work, and thus with the taxes of other residents, also known as taxpayers or even respected voters, as needed.
There are countless more or less well-known agencies that conduct these surveys. I consider the more reliable ones to be those that examine the real needs of both the population and various companies. On the other side of my value spectrum are agencies that feed off pre-election moods, with some of them releasing their surveys week after week.
And here, the results are almost entirely dependent on who commissioned the survey. And our media feast on these surveys like pigs in clover, evaluating every single output from every agency. Who's up in the polls, who's down, who has a chance, who doesn't. But a single survey is like a swallow – one does not make a spring. It is important to follow the so-called trend, or the development of individual parties. And here it appears that the main players on our political scene are essentially moving at almost the same numbers, while the popularity of other entities is like a roller coaster.
In surveys, it also depends on how the respondent is asked, i.e., what question they answer. It often has a big impact whether the respondent is presented with a list of parties that have a potential chance of winning the election, or whether the choice is left directly to the interviewer. This essentially eliminates small parties, because the interviewer does not remember them.
And then there are respondents who can surprise you. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution, I worked for about a year as an interviewer for an agency that dealt with the commercial sphere, with political questions sometimes only as a supplement. Rather, they were intended to show the preferences of individual respondents with regard to their attitudes. Because I worked in a more or less familiar circle, i.e., I knew almost everyone I approached, I was able to guess their answers in many cases. Nevertheless, I was surprised by two of them. A pensioner, originally from Germany and chairman of the local communist organization in a small factory, confessed to me that he was not particularly fond of them, but rather of social democracy. And the second, a former communist in the same factory, when asked "Who is a greater threat to democracy in our country?
a) Current communists
b) Former communists
answered that it would be former communists. Fortunately, it was the last question in the questionnaire, so I was able to thank him and leave. I laughed all the way home.