Quote (Ghot @ 20 Nov 2017 10:02)
Here is a German article giving Merkel a 54% approval rating.
http://www.dw.com/en/support-for-merkel-rebounds-in-latest-poll/a-35984981The problem with approval ratings, everywhere is that even IF they are unbiased, they will be biased. It's the same in the US. Even the most respected polls are somewhat biased.
There are many ways they can be biased...
1. The way the questions are asked
2. Whether the person being polled fits the accepted norm. Aka, the person might be doing a good job, but just might not be...liked.
3. Very few people who answer these polls are completely unbiased.
I think the best you can do where polls are concerned is take the results from about 10 of them, and then take the average. Even then, it can still be inaccurate.
Take Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was a well liked president. But you really can't go by whatever his poll numbers may have been. I'm sure there were many folk who would give a lower approval vote, knowing he was in a wheelchair.
A wheelchair would not affect how well a president was doing his job, but some people may be biased against a govt. official in a wheelchair.
Granted this is an extreme case, but look at Trump. He may be getting some percent of disapproval, just because his hair is weird. Anything can affect people's view of another person.
In Trump's specific case, he is dealing with a very severe partisan divide. In all my life, I've never seen worse.
I'm not sticking up for Trump in this case, just saying that so much animosity would sully the approval rating of the best of presidents.
/e I guess my main point is that polls are helpful, but not by any means...the last word.this is a surprisingly sane and coherent post considering who it's from and i actually agree with most of your points.
considering this specific case, however, the article you linked is from october 2016(!) and referring to a "deutschlandtrend" poll. you know who conducts these? infratest dimap, the same institute i linked in my post, just a year old - and if you refer to the graphic i posted earlier you will see that 54% for october 2016 are represented in the graph.
and even if that was her current approval rating, it would be significantly better than trump's (rcp average takes many polls into account, including rasmussen) - despite our multi party democracy.
again, i'm not even trying to illustrate what a great or popular politician merkel is, i disagree with her on a whole lot of things, especially her naive approach to the refugee crisis, but the examiner article trying to make it sound like trump's historically bad approval ratings are somehow insignificant because some european leaders have even worse, is not only a heavily flawed comparison based on the different party systems, but also outright false in the case of merkel by any reasonable standard.
This post was edited by fender on Nov 20 2017 04:03am
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