According to a recent poll, 72% of Americans approve of coal-fired electricity. Of course, the poll was commissioned by the coal industry who only surveyed 600 “opinion elites.”
In early October, pollsters commissioned by the coal industry group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) interviewed 600 individuals nationwide about their position on coal. But pollsters did not seek a random survey, rather they sought the preferences of so-called “opinion elites” nationwide.
Opinion elites are defined by pollsters as “adults with $80,000 or more in household income and a four-year college degree or more and a professional or managerial job title or a business owner and a high degree of involvement in politics and policy matters.”
But why an elite survey? The elite survey methodology is something that was experimented with by the social sciences in the middle part of the twentieth century and pretty much abandoned soon thereafter.
Elite opinion surveys gained popularity in academic disciplines like comparative politics, anthropology and sociology, because social scientists had no good way to learn about the intricacies of political systems and cultures of ‘foreign’ peoples. Opinion elites were often turned to because they spoke English and could communicate with Western researchers. But elite opinion surveys were essentially abandoned because they fly in the face of the core principles of democracy. Results of the methodologically dubious survey include:
* 72 percent of opinion leaders nationwide support the use of coal to generate electricity, which, according to pollsters, is the highest level of support since the group began polling nearly 10 years ago.
* When asked the question “do you believe coal is a fuel for America’s future?”- 69 percent of Americans agreed (compared to 26 percent who disagreed).
* 72 percent of opinion elites agreed that new technologies would allow coal-based electricity plants to meet an ultra-low emissions profile (near zero emissions including the capture and storage of carbon dioxide) within the next 10 to 20 years.
* 84 percent of opinion elites agreed developing new advanced clean coal technologies offered opportunities to create American jobs and export these technologies to other countries (65 percent).
So when the vice-president of communications for ACCE says “The fundamentals of the energy debate have changed,” in favor of coal-fired electricity, you should take it with a grain of salt. If anything, the fundamentals of the debate have been completely re-written. I take considerable issue with the notion that “environmental concerns were the primary driver of the debate in the past,” as ACCE claims in a statement. Money was the driver in the past; money is the driver currently; and money will likely be the driver in the future.
Once again I ask, why the elite survey methodology? Do these so-called opinion elites know something about coal that the rest of us plebeians do not?
Image:© Arnd Drifte | Dreamstime.com
About Timothy B. Hurst
I would only add that elite interviewing is neither disproven nor invalid. While this method will lack representativeness, it is an important means of bounding the opinions of stakeholders and key decisionmakers.