Respected professor of Sociology, promoter and president of the Sistema Foundation, José Félix Tezanos (Santander, 1946) has become, as president of the CIS, one of the obsessions of the right due to his updating of the vote estimation system. His appearances in Congress are a pimpampum in which Tezanos receives complaints about the CIS survey and he distributes sociological tow with professorial indifference.
Under his direction there have been many changes in the CIS, technological modernizations, personnel
The CIS comes from the Institute of Public Opinion that was founded in 1963, now exactly 60 years ago. We are in very dynamic societies and institutes such as the CIS are logically affected by these changes. The main change that has taken place during the period that I have been in the presidency of the CIS is the transition from home surveys to telephone surveys. Then, we have introduced all the technical improvements that have been raised. In this period, the CIS already has more than 160 contracted interviewers doing field work, which is very powerful. Now we have the capacity to do a thousand interviews a day and that has been growing. A whole new technology department has also had to be hired because there were no computer scientists at the CIS. And there were salary problems. I have tried to comply and take advantage of my management experience to improve technical levels. In addition, now there is an important change that has to do with the method that the CIS was using – and many polling houses still use – which continues to give rise to vote estimates in many places that are far from reality because It is not taken into account that at this moment the variables that influence the vote are very varied, that is, it is not only the memory of the vote that influences.
Yes, we will return to this, which has brought a lot of controversy.
All these changes have to do with social changes, concern for universal mental health, the coronavirus epidemic, which at first was causing tremendous mortality in hospitals, but not only among the sick but among the medical teams. We were fortunate that one of those paradoxes of our historical times occurred: two Turkish-Germans who had a laboratory and who were being very avant-garde experimenting with drugs to combat certain forms of cancer had the idea that what they were doing could be applied to cure other diseases and avoid contagion. And in a short time we had efficient vaccines. Many of the researchers, great scientists, who began to investigate at that time, to this day have not yet validated their vaccines. It was a stroke of fortune for humanity, we cannot deny it. If it hadn't happened, half of humanity would probably be dead today, a terrifying experience. Well, when that happens we have another set of crises starting with the Ukraine war, massive tank battles in Europe. During this period, we have published many things about Covid, more than a thousand pages with 48 active researchers on how our societies have been transformed, our habits, there is more and more family life, teleworking has expanded, online meetings... That is to say, this is a whirlwind, everything is going so fast that we have not had time to stop and contemplate with perspective everything that is happening and at the speed at which it is going. Here we have worked for the CIS to carry out a useful task, I insist a lot on this, useful for society as a whole, because that is really the work in which we are committed. For all political parties. Now we publish the data immediately and offer all the raw data, which is what everyone can use.
And it has introduced the monthly periodicity of the voting intention survey.
But that is a fallacy. That is, the CIS had always carried out monthly surveys. What happened is that when Pilar del Castillo was appointed, she decided to ask the question about the intention to vote only once a quarter. I, who was closely related to this house – like all sociologists – then asked why they had done that and at the time they told me that every time the CIS took out a poll, a tremendous one was put together. But of course, now with the volatility that exists, with the changes that occur today from one month to the next, it was necessary to return to the monthly survey. We have seen it in what has happened with the PP, which was in total decline and, suddenly, there is a congress and for several months Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the PP appear ahead of the PSOE. People don't remember it now, but it was like that. And then it went down again. Please note that surveys are valid for the time they are taken and forecasts are for that time only. That is why you have to be up-to-date, and being up-to-date means having to be constantly doing surveys.
And they have expanded the sample, right? From two thousand and a half interviews to almost four thousand.
Yes, the theoretical mass is 4,000, before it was 2,500. Some want this to be ruled by law, a law that says that only 2,500 surveys have to be done. In other words, like in the Middle Ages, let's say, when the thickness of the fabrics was taxed by law. In polls there is a lot of non-response, in a sample of 2,500, those who actually responded were about 1,200 and the theoretical margins of error in each of the parties were very large. Raising it to 4,000 – and it would be even better to do it to 5,000 – we have at least 2,000 responses from someone who truly gives their opinion. This is how we provide the information, the raw data, with tremendous speed.
Why is your vote estimate so questionable?
Yes, yes, there is a lot of questioning with our estimate of the vote and fundamentally it is because everyone, all the polling houses, still use the vote recall system. Some, honestly, do not know much about these matters and talk a little too much. But the simple model, applying only vote recall, has to be suspect if you work on complex societies. In practice, it doesn't work. We are working on a new model with Antonio Alaminos, professor of mathematical sociology, one of the people who knows the most about this in Europe, the v108 model. Some already call it "the Alaminos-Tezanos model", which takes into account variables such as voting history, memory, closest party, self-location, preference for a president... and up to 108 variables. It is a complex model about which extensive articles have been written explaining that it is a model that has come close to reality, as happened in the April 2019 elections. I always say that this has a factor of chance because human beings are free, you can say that you are going to vote and not go, or say that you are going to vote for one and in the end change. But in any case, that model has become quite fine-tuned, and there is a lot of academic literature on it. There have been 23 electoral processes and in 22, the CIS polls have marked the voting trend that followed. There was only one in which it was not successful, which is that of Castilla y León, with Vox. Overall, the forecast that we gave for the PP and for the PSOE had a variation of 2,000 votes, that is, one thing or the other could have happened. But yes, we underestimated Vox, and we immediately corrected the model. So maybe what is happening now is that the CIS model overestimates the Vox vote.
Even so, his estimates are highly contested and he has placed the institute at the center of the political struggle.
But between the projection that we make and the primary data there is not that much difference. For example, in the January barometer, in terms of direct intention to vote, the PP appears half a point ahead of the PSOE and in the estimate of the vote that we make with our model, the PSOE is about a point ahead. They are very small variations that are within the theoretical margins of error. That is to say, at this moment the sociological reality that is taking place in Spain is that there is practically a tie between two great forces. It must be remembered that the PP in the November 2019 elections had 20% of the votes and now it may be around 29%, the PSOE had 28% and now it is around 30% or 31%. But along with that, what we are seeing is that there are other parties that are tending to disappear, parties that were very strong in the April 2019 elections and that now have hardly any parliamentary representation. But for example, there are other elements of personal credibility, and when you ask those surveyed who they prefer as Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez takes 10 points ahead of Núñez Feijóo in the possible vote actually cast, which is a lot. Then there is another leader, who is emerging strongly, which is Yolanda Díaz, who also has many people who prefer her as president of the Government. I always say that when voting there are many models, there are those who vote with their heads, there are those who vote with their wallets, there are those who vote with their guts and there are even those who vote as something from below, with irritation. Another example: women are overwhelmingly voting for the PSOE right now, which is a powerful cultural shift. And now we have also done a very interesting study for everyone who follows these issues, on the expectations of young people.
Has youth changed much?
Twenty years ago, most young people expected to have a family and a small house; 10 years ago, they thought of being able to rent a small apartment, and now, they are thinking of being able to rent a room in a shared house. It's a tremendous lowering of expectations. And you begin to see quite a few among young people who see it as the most natural thing to have voted for Vox, people with firm positions. There is a latent awareness among young people that firm, important things must be demanded. The study is of young people between the ages of 18 and 35, and there are beginning to be young people who, after having voted once for Podemos, voted for Vox. In any case, in the case of Vox, what is happening is that there is a process that some called "Come back home for Christmas", some are returning to their original vote because almost all of them had voted for the PP at some point. Then this is affected by other phenomena, for example in the case of the PP, how quickly the leaders burn out. You have to think that from the first parliamentary debate that Pedro Sánchez held, neither Casado nor Ribera are there anymore, and the party may disappear.
Yes, of the five men in their 40s who ran for the 2019 elections, three are out of politics before turning 50. But now that up to five polls are being published a week, don't you feel that To some extent, with its change in the estimation model and the monthly periodicity, has it put the CIS on the trigger, which has lowered it in a market of opinion and conflict?
No, because we continue to carry out the same in-depth surveys as always: the consumer confidence index, we are carrying out the health barometer, the fiscal barometers, the studies on gender violence... all of this continues to be done and it seems to me that it is the right thing to do. most powerful and most interesting of the CIS. But then, the forecast debate is a bit of a curious debate.
What is it referring to?
What would an outside observer say that the inhabitants of this planet were discussing projections? The important thing about the CIS, I insist, is its primary data, which is very reliable data with a highly contrasted, very broad sample, with which everyone can make their own projections. The CIS continues to do practically the same thing that it has been doing, perhaps with a difference.
Which?
That at other times, those of us who criticized those who were in charge of the CIS were educated people, some of us were even professors, and we also did it out of affection and normality. And now there is extremely tense, insulting behavior. Someone has even scolded me on the street and I have said, "but what's wrong with you?" They live with a passion for surveys that is not very well understood. But it had to be done, the estimation model had to be modernized. What happens is that it is necessary to do it well, and at this moment we have many people who are making estimates and others who have not studied sociology and who are what are commonly called "numerologists". So, of course, you can vary the numbers and put them in the blender and do whatever you want with them, but you have to identify realities. We are very changeable societies and we have seen it in many countries, that from the first to the second round of a presidential election there are spectacular changes. And we have also seen the pressure of certain convergences of polling houses that agree to give the same forecasts. The telephone works, the telephone consensus.
For example?
We have seen it in very powerful countries, like the United States. In the last elections, the Democrats went as if to the slaughterhouse, they recognized that they were going to lose by the consensus of the polls. With the resources that they have from their analytical systems and look, in the end, they reinforced the majority that they have in the Senate.
He talks about volatility, but the impression I have is that, acronyms aside, if you look at the correlation of the electoral spaces these are quite stable and move in long waves, like background currents.
There is a lot of volatility in names and there are voters of certain positions who over the last five years have taken ballot papers with different names to vote for them. Which is also something that is sometimes not understood, that is why in the CIS questions we use a self-identification model, "where you are located on a left-right axis", proposing that 1 is the furthest to the left and 10, furthest to the right. That really shows a very great consistency in the last 20 or 30 years: those who are located on the left are around 62% or 63%. I have taken that to parliamentary debates and I have shown the graphs, and they told me that they were biased. Well, but these data are from before I arrived at the CIS, from the Rajoy government period. Does that mean that 62% of the people will always vote for left-wing parties? Well no, because sometimes they abstain. In addition, a new inflection has occurred in recent times in Spain: the space of the extreme right has not grown, because curiously it is a space that overlaps with the PP. And that is why the Vox votes can return to them more quickly than they even estimate in the PP. However, there has been a small radicalization on the left, especially among young people who live in a precarious situation. There is indeed a breeding ground that is around 14% or 15%, to the left of the PSOE. And then there are the large spaces in which the central parties are located. And there are significant elements for those who want to study the CIS data. For example, the space of 5 of the left-right axis is a very powerful space at a certain moment and that is where the PP electorate penetrates. But it is that the PSOE electorate is now penetrating the 6 [centre-right]. That is what the surveys are detecting. If 67% say that their economic situation is going well or very well, that means that that voter can say: "Well, this government is going well for me."
There are some commonplaces in Spanish electoral analysis, such as the one that pointed out that the electorate leans slightly to the left. Another of those commonplaces is that the economy rules in the votes. However, this poorly explains the success of the ultra-right or authoritarian, illiberal right-wing, which focuses its battle on cultural issues, not on material issues.
Even appealing to issues of hate, yes, resurrecting the hateful images of war. That does not exist in Spanish society. There is a radicalization from above, but in society that does not exist. This does not mean that social reality is inoculated from this risk. What happens is that many times it is a matter of pure strategic design: if you have a country in which 62% of the population is located on the left, do not talk about left and right, talk about other things, attack people discrediting them and trying to make a fuss, a lot of noise, so that the vote is not rationalized. You have to ensure that there are no debates about what is important. For example, if at this moment we asked for a list of the important things that should be discussed in a country like Spain, it would come out that there are many young people who have a hard time, that there are many women who continue to have a position of lack or of limitations, that the minimum wage must be raised, that the economy must stimulate consumption and generate opportunities, that health must be improved, that very decisive policies must be made to avoid the structural unemployment that Spanish society afflicts. .. Well, those debates will have to be held. But sometimes we see Martian debates, talking about whether or not one is lying or if he is tall he is short. It would be necessary to carry out a sociological test by bringing someone who knows nothing about Spain and putting them to watch a debate on television so that they can identify the positions and guess what they are talking about when they speak so vehemently. "That gentleman is surely defending the work of his children." Well, what he is saying is that the other is a liar. There are political marketing advisers who are specialists in messing things up because in a more messy thing there are some who can get some advantage out of the smoke.
In that sense, is the CIS the antithesis of the "story" we talk about so much now?
No, not necessarily. We have to go deeper into qualitative studies. We have set up a room for qualitative studies where we have done all this work on young people, and also for experimental studies. I think that this is very important: knowing why we are here, what we expect from life, how we would like to be treated, what we are willing to do for society, if we are willing to commit ourselves, how we see international solidarity... these are the big questions. . That has a story, what happens is that now we have moved on from the great philosophies and the periods of the great blocks, the great thinkers. Is it possible in the society of our time someone like Karl Marx, like Webber...? Well, I don't know if these characters today are more occasional or we are living in societies that are of the latest occurrence, of the latest simplification. And this gives rise to many people taking refuge, rather than in thought, in literature. There is a great rise of literature in our society. The novelty that we have added to the CIS at this time are what are called flash studies. We are going to publish the flash surveys, something that was very difficult to do when the surveys were home-based. Right now we have the capacity to do a thousand surveys a day and we will probably have the possibility of doing two thousand. So we're going to do a powerful flash study at the beginning, the first week of the campaign, and then we'll do the post-election study.
But, is anyone interested in post-electoral work?
I think so, it is an important job even if it does not have so much publicity. People use it, we immediately put it on the CIS web page, which has thousands of entries, tremendous works followed by hundreds of people who are doing doctoral theses, study services from other countries..., what happens is that does not give rise to great stories. In the 2019 elections, all the polls said one thing and the CIS another. What the CIS said came out and some made T-shirts that said “Tezanos was right”. They sent me some, it was a spontaneous thing that came out of young people. Who said that Salvador Illa was going to be the leading political force in Catalonia? It was funny because no one apologized for all the previous insults, but nevertheless they were a bit comically virulent.
Do polls have a performative capacity, that is, can they condition the results? A sociologist explained to me that many polling houses carry out surveys with the result that the client demands to force a certain social mood in periods when there are no elections, but they correct the shot when the elections approach so as not to lose prestige. How important is a poll to achieve a result?
It is a topic that has been studied a lot in sociology. There are theses for all tastes. One person who knew a lot about this was Pedro Arriola. He said that the polls had no influence and that, furthermore, the only good poll was the one that was done at the beginning of the campaign, that then things varied in one direction and another, and in the end things returned to normal. He was quite right and that has been studied a lot, there is a lot of analyst literature on this. I doubt that they have an influence, they can have very little influence on the useful vote, that is to say that they can define two or three options and people can at some point opt for a useful vote. But less and less, because there are no parties with large majorities anymore. What is curious is that there are certain sectors of political activity, everything that is the world of the extreme right and of some international consortiums that have a very defined strategy of buying polling houses. There has been a spectacular shopping offer in all countries in recent years.
Because?
Because there are some sectors that want to control public opinion because they think that the world is heading towards neo-Keynesian scenarios, that people now want more State and more security. And they want to neutralize it. Many houses have been bought and they have them working in a very specific direction. I know that on some occasions the new owners, when called by a political party, answer: "Who do you want me to put in charge?" That is why there are forecasts that are sometimes so far from reality and that is why the important thing is to know what the primary data are. First, if real surveys are done, and second, what are the primary data. There are countries like Germany where when a survey is published, by law they have to communicate the real data, what really appears in the survey, and then if they want to make a forecast or an estimate they have to publish it as an opinion, not as information .
Why doesn't the CIS already ask about the population's support for the monarchy?
When I arrived, it had been five years since anyone had asked a question about the monarchy. We ask up to six questions to all respondents about what the main problems are, the three main ones for him and the three for the country, and the monarchy does not appear as a concern in the answers, so it makes no sense to ask about it.
With Trump, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Johnson, even Díaz Ayuso... we have been seeing the new right grow effervescently from one month to the next, but that effervescence seems to make its leaders ephemeral, with a great capacity to mobilize votes in against, as we saw with Donald Trump who, improving the votes with which he defeated Clinton by five million, lost to Joe Biden. I suspect that many mainstream conservatives voted Democrat that day.
It is that they are feeding the fear of themselves, I don't know in the end who will have sold them that, but they are a bit rude. Let's say, from an analytical point of view, that you can have that kind of magician feeling and people want to vote for the winner. But the effect of those who did not intend to vote may also evolve. What strikes me the most is that mid-term election in the United States, how did the whole world come to assume that the Trumpists were going to sweep, they were going to have control of Congress and the Senate. It forms part of an ideology that will have to be studied, just as the Frankfurt School studied fascism. The ideology of the boss is a very arrogant thing, that is, very cultural, I don't know, from the 40s, from the neighborhoods of those gang movies, the political macho, the macho culture, and if someone doesn't is, they tell him that he is lazy.
A reaction to the feminist fourth wave?
Definitely.
I have said many times to those who asked me about the possibility that the right wing wins the elections here and governs with the participation of the extreme right that there are two reinsurances, the EU, because we are the fourth economy in the euro...
…And there are important unions, add that too.
And that the electoral space is made up of two halves, left and right, that end up breaking the tie between the hegemonic Catalan and Basque parties, and that this would prevent the PP from governing with Vox, due to its nationalist component.
That's how it is. The Spanish right today cannot agree with the Basque and Catalan right, because it is exclusive with Vox.
Seeing the president's foreign credit, why is it not reflected in the polls? Is that a question of the polls, of the media, or is international prestige really not capitalized on domestic popularity?
He has the backing. For example, at this time, in rigorous CIS surveys, support for President Sánchez is higher than support for the PSOE. That is to say, Pedro Sánchez has a plus over the PSOE's own vote. That was what Felipe González had at the time. He had two or three points more than the game and it seemed like a lot to us, but it is that Pedro Sánchez can have up to six or seven points today. What happens in the case of Pedro Sánchez with some survey assessments? Well, they are carried out with the arithmetic mean system, and the arithmetic means collect the very favorable and very negative votes, and there is a sector in Spanish society –sometimes I make the joke and they take it seriously– that is envy because he is tall. He has a pretty significant support element. But in Spain we have a long tradition, Machado said, of despising our own. If someone comes out well in Spain, we poke them to go abroad. National pessimism. That is a great factor that can be seen in a question from the CIS that is paradoxical: 67% say that they are doing well economically, but the same 67% say that the economic situation of the country is bad.
Is this paradox due to the media?
There's that old saying that it's not news when a dog bites a child, but when a child bites a dog it is. And that applies to the field of politics and the media. But I realize that there is also a lack of sense of humor, resurrecting clichés of the short and bad Spanish that some said. So the arithmetic mean captures that.
The “spirit of Juanito”, I remember.
In this sense, Pedro Sánchez, in his own electoral space, was a leader subjected to terrible criticism. But without primaries, the PSOE probably would not have had such a leader. The primaries give a great porosity to the parties.
There are those who maintain that the 2003 European elections, which gave the PP the winner despite the fact that it had been hit hard by the Prestige and the Iraq war, were a mirage that the PP did not know how to read, hence all this discomfort, catalyzed by 11-11. M, will be expressed in 2004. Could this happen, for example, in the regional elections in May?
Elections are watertight compartments. There are people who vote for one thing in one place and another in another. For example, in the municipal vote the person and the proximity are very influential. Whoever has leaders involved in municipal life has more possibilities. But I believe that municipal elections and autonomies are not as predetermined as some think. I believe that there are quite open panoramas there and it will depend on the development of the campaign itself. There may be surprises. But it can perfectly happen that one thing happens in municipal and regional governments, and a few months later something else happens in general. This has happened in many countries and it can also happen that a party that thinks it has some very dominated strongholds in the municipal and regional elections is very disappointed that the electorate ultimately votes differently. For example, in Madrid the data says that, but you don't have to believe the data. Some studies are done a little strangely. I believe that the vote of certain people is counted twice, as a voter of one party and of another, that is, it does not take into account the asymmetric sums, the watertight compartments. It may happen that there are parties that go down a lot and that others go up, but nevertheless the final correlation of forces does not change.
Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Valencian Community..., where is the result more unpredictable?
There are many speculations in one direction and in another about which are the places where it will be more difficult to hit. Madrid is probably a community that is very open because, in addition, there is another important political force [Más Madrid] that is not going to operate in the rest of Spain and because it is going to depend a lot on the economic resources of the extreme right formations to spend on those elections. And it seems that there have been international problems there, also with the failure of expectations. I believe that there is going to be a very determining factor in all the campaigns and that is that in these elections, in all of them, there are many accumulated factors that subtract and add votes. For example, that extra that Pedro Sánchez contributes with respect to the PSOE at this time, for example, I don't know if all the candidates in the case of the PSOE are going to use it well. Out of laziness, out of personal jealousy..., when someone very important comes, they overshadow you a bit in the acts, so that I don't know if they will know how to take advantage of that multiplying factor, adder of votes. Most will know how to do it, because the intelligence of those who have been in this for a long time is not to be discussed. And yet, I don't know if in the case of other parties they have leaders who have as much additional pull.
