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Simple Comments on Local Parties (1)

Robert Ting-Yiu Chung
(Director of Public Opinion Programme, the University of Hong Kong)

Translated by Lee Wai Kin
(Research Executive, Public Opinion Programme, the University of Hong Kong)

Note: This article represents the view of the author and not the University of Hong Kong.

Since political groups are not yet legal entities in Hong Kong, it is rather difficult to define political parties in a scientific way or on a legal basis. The author can solve this problem by three ways commonly used in public opinion studies. First, to be defined by the organizations themselves, those who claimed that they are political parties would be taken for granted; otherwise they are not considered to be political parties. Second, to be defined by the people, those political groups which are generally accepted by the general public would be considered as political parties. Third, political groups to be analyzed in a macro perspective, this would intentionally avoid the differentiation of political parties and other political organizations.

Chaired by the author, HKUPOP conducts surveys and releases the figures of top ten political groups in Hong Kong on a regular basis. The survey combines the above-mentioned second and third ways to select the most popular political organizations to Hong Kong citizens, and further rank them by their supporting rates. Summarizing last year's results, herewith the ten most popular political groups in Hong Kong: Democratic Party (DP), Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB), Liberal Party (LP), A45 Concern Group, Frontier, Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (FTU), Hong Kong Association for Democracy and People's Livelihood (ADPL), Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (CTU), April Fifth Action (AFA) and Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movement in China (HKASPDMC).

With respect to supporting rate using a scale of 0 to 100, the highest five political organizations among the top ten usually score about 50 marks in each survey. The scores are lower than those for political figures of similar ratings. This shows that people recognize political figures more than political groups, which indirectly reflects the shortcoming of political parties in their development.

Of course, in order to fully analyze the condition of political parties' development, simply looking at people's familiarity and supporting rate towards each political party is just a shallow way. The author prefers to analyze the strengths of political parties from three different dimensions: first is people's support, which includes the number of party members and the above-mentioned survey figures; second is political strength, which includes the number of seats taken in the Councils and political impact; and third is its development potentials, which include research power and the support from party members.

Analyzed from these three aspects, all the local and so-called political parties are considered to have hearts but lack the strengths.

Simple Comments on Local Parties (2)

With respect to their people's support, political strength and development potentials, all the local political parties are considered to have hearts but lack the strengths. Yesterday we mentioned about people's support and social legitimacy. The focus of this paper is to explore on their political strength and development potentials based on their research power.

According to the regular survey results of HKUPOP, the top ten political groups include: A45 Concern Group (now Civic Party), FTU, CTU, ADPL, LP, DP, DAB, HKASPDMC, Frontier and AFA. The author analyzed the content of their websites.

Representing the benefits of workers, FTU and CTU have constructed their websites with almost no information on public opinion surveys. The website of FTU has no survey research, while the one of CTU does, but only mentions two small surveys. On the other hand, inside the websites of HKASPDMC and AFA, their content is mostly related to ideological events and papers without any survey research at all.

Perhaps due to their fixed positions, the above-mentioned groups have almost zero research power. We may rule them out from the analysis of political parties. However, for the remaining six so-called or widely-accepted political parties, their research power is not strong either.

Established for a little more than one month, the Civic Party has published only one research report on the electricity market in its website, which is considered reasonable. Yet, given that LP is financially strong, ADPL and the Frontier have no short history, but all their websites have only listed five public opinion surveys altogether, which truly reflects how much they respect policy research.

The remaining two political parties have different situations. Both DP and DAB have listed various and frequent survey research information starting from 1998 on their websites. Let's say in 2005, the two parties released altogether 62 public opinion surveys, meaning at least one survey per week. Regretfully, most of these surveys were conducted by interactive voice response system, which is far behind the current international standard of public opinion surveys.

Recognizing the whole through the observation of the part, local political parties basically have no progress on their own research base. Instead, they only seek for instant political benefits that are showy but unpractical.