Quinnipiac Poll Shows Extent to Which Question Wording Influences Outcomes

[one...two...tree 2,762]

By Josh Nelson

While the level of support for offshore drilling in Quinnipiac's poll experienced a 9% decrease since August 2008, many other polls have shown a greater decline. This likely has something to do with how Quinnipiac framed the offshore drilling question: "To help solve the energy crisis and make America less dependent on foreign oil, do you support or oppose – drilling for new oil supplies in currently protected areas off shore?"

This wording of this question has multiple problems, but I'll focus on one in particular.

A leading question is a question that contains a false presupposition. The potentially false presuppositions here are that expanded offshore drilling will "help solve the energy crisis" and "make America less dependent on foreign oil." As many commentators have noted, the energy crisis is primarily a demand-side problem. Efforts undertaken to marginally increase energy supplies, while ignoring the broader problems of waste and excessive consumption, will not necessarily do anything to "help solve the energy crisis." It is also not clear that increased offshore drilling would "make America less dependent on foreign oil," despite being a relatively prominent conservative talking point. As a fungible commodity, oil is sold on the global market at prices determined internationally. Oil extracted from the Gulf of Mexico by a multinational corporation is just as likely to end up in a motorbike in Wuhan or Shenzhen as an SUV in Des Moines or Sacramento.

At best, both of these presuppositions are matters of opinion. At worst, they project conservative frames as fact, immediately prior to asking a highly charged and overtly political question. Either way, they don't add anything meaningful to our understanding of public opinion on the issue.

Using liberal/environmental frames as the presuppositions, the question could have been worded differently: "To prevent catastrophic environmental disasters like the one currently taking place in the Gulf of Mexico, do you support or oppose – drilling for new oil supplies in currently protected areas off shore?"

Is there any doubt that such wording would have produced different results?

If the goal of the question is to determine the level of support for offshore drilling, why not ask that directly? Associating the practice of offshore drilling with two presumably positive outcomes is likely to prime participants for pro-drilling responses.

http://seminal.fired...om/diary/52317/

[alienlovechild 75]

Oil extracted from the Gulf of Mexico by a multinational corporation is just as likely to end up in a motorbike in Wuhan or Shenzhen as an SUV in Des Moines or Sacramento.

Wrong.

The US does export petroleum molecules. But it almost rarely does it in the form of crude. But the US exports a fair amount of other things. For example, the EIA, in its most recent weekly report, reported 154,000 b/d of NGL exports, a figure likely to rise as more shale gas comes on line; 458,000 b/d of residual fuel, as resid's share of the electric generating market continues to dwindle and even as supply is squeezed out of the market by coking capacity; and 441,000 b/d of petroleum coke, which also makes sense, because the US has a large amount of deep conversion capacity through coking, and one of the end products of coking is petroleum coke.

In the latest report, the US also was reported to be shipping out 252,000 b/d of gasoline, more than half of it going to Mexico with a good chunk to several impoverished Latin American and Central American nations; and 389,000 b/d of distillate, again, most of it to Latin America but with a significant amount to the Netherlands, whose terminals in places like Rotterdam serve as the basis for further shipment into a distillate-short European continent.

All of this is easily discernible, but instead CAP makes a simplistic equation. If the US didn't ship out the oil it is exporting then it wouldn't need to produce an offsetting amount of crude.

This theory is saying that if the US slices downstream exports of apples, it can cut upstream production of oranges. But then you've cut off a feedstock supply for the refineries' production of what the US still very much needs, like gasoline? And what does the US do with petroleum coke it doesn't need, or LPGs, or distillates? Presumably the prices for those products would drop to bargain-basement levels, possibly killing refining margins in the process and forcing refiners to cut back output of things the US most definitely does need - like gasoline.

For example, if the US stopped shipping distillates to Europe, European refiners would have to squeeze out even more distillate, and probably would do that squeezing by cutting down on their gasoline yields. That means less gasoline to export to the US, driving gasoline prices in the US higher. Is that a CAP goal?

The relatively small portion of the US supply/demand balance that is exported has long been a ripe target for political gain, but it also serves as a platform in which an utter lack of understanding of how markets work can be put on display. (Rep. Ed Markey, a long-time oil industry critic, has called for a ban on US oil exports).

http://www.platts.com/weblog/oilblog/2010/05/09/us_oil_exp.html

Edited June 3, 2010 by alienlovechild

[Peikko 1,575]

How can the wording not be important depending on how it's slanted? It's one of the many reasons why relying on referenda to solve issues is a flawed approach. Polling is one of those industries that today is probably more of a waste of time than a useful tool but I don't see them going away.