To know how politicians think at a given moment is valuable to readers in a country like Venezuela, which is going through a process of rapid political changes. But how does a news organization inquire into this?
The solution to this dilemma was an issue raised by the Research department of El Universal, a Caracas-based national journal. We designed a 32-question census addressed to a group of candidates to the National Constituent Assembly with chances of being elected in the last July election. This enabled readers to know the opinions of the Constituent Assembly that they had elected, as of the day after the election.
The Constituent Census was an unprecedented journalistic experience in the field of elite studies in Venezuela.
The Constituent Census was an unprecedented journalistic experience in the field of elite studies in Venezuela. It was possible because of the automation of the Venezuelan official ballots by the National Electoral Council. Just as it had been anticipated, the names of the 128-winning candidates were known merely two and a half hours after the balloting centers had closed.
How it started
The questionnaire, handed out to the candidates during the two weeks before the elections, contained topics relating to the national politics, some value features and socio-demographic aspects such as age, state of birth, sex and social origin.
The editor-in-chief's office had expounded to the researchers that its intent was to publish the day after the elections. Therefore, the vital issue that had to be addressed in advance was to determine who would be the winners amongst more than one thousand candidates.
Such a delicate issue was successfully resolved by resorting to some political reckoning and a little luck.
The decision on how many and what candidates had to be interviewed was made one month before the elections. It was calculated that two candidates for each of the 128 posts would result in 256 interviews, a reasonable amount to be handled by the team of 11 reporters from the Research department and the Fundación Andrés Mata.
The open-list, simple majority electoral system was used. To decide who would be the interviewees, the thesis initially adopted was to choose all the candidates identified with President Hugo Chávez, who had a very high popularity ranking. The 128 candidates were chosen from the opponent and independent party factions.
In Venezuela, candidates are willing to attend to the press on the phone, even to respond to a 32-question query. Consequently, the most difficult step in accomplishing the interviews was to get the phone numbers of the 256 candidates. Only about 10 of the candidates chosen could not be interviewed, whether because they declined to grant the interview or because they could not be contacted.
Results
The electoral result was surprising. President Chávez supporters won 122 of the 128 posts, and the opposition won only four, two were independent: only one of the candidates elected had not been included on the initial list of interviewees. Out of the winners, we interviewed 92 percent.
Two reporters downloaded the questionnaires coded using the SPSS processor. Thus, the database was created with 42 different variables, with data on the answers of 256 candidates to the Constituent Assembly.
Within two hours of the release of partial election results, our final database had already been built in SPSS.
The first day, the results of four questions were published; these questions allowed us to figure out that 97 percent of the candidates elected was thinking of implementing the presidential re-election.
The SPSS crossing of the variables on family origin and the socio-educational level of the constituents resulted in one transcendent finding. It has been determined that a half of the constituents appointed, the new dominant political class, meets the condition of being a university professional who comes from the low class or the middle low class. This condition was met only by 37 percent of the Congress elected 8 months ago. None came from the high class.
Certainly, the full potential of SPSS was not used. But some indices were created relating to several questions on the military topic and that of the decentralization policy, which permitted us to determine a high tendency to the political participation of the military, and also towards decentralization. The Constituent Census was the second study on political elites that El Universal conducted during 1999, and one that has been an innovative contribution of precision journalism to the political sciences for consultation at different universities in this Latin American country. A third study is pending with the election of the new Congress, which will provide a more sound knowledge on the quality and thought of the political elite and the change process that is taking place in Venezuela.
Carlos Subero can be reached by e-mail at csubero@callisto.eud.com