民調中的從眾效應－以臺中市及雲林縣為例

1980年代，Sidney Blumenthal從對美國政治運作的觀察，提出「永無止盡選戰」（permanent campaign）的概念，指出美國總統甫上任即開始為連任作準備，刻意藉由民意調查探討選民對政策方向的看法，甚而改變選民對政治議題的看法及對施政的支持，將「選戰」（campaign）意涵納入政府治理的一環。從眾效應的理論認為，民意的操縱或形塑是可能的，但如何觀察和測量？本文以臺中市和雲林縣的施政為例，運用二波定群追蹤的民意調查，將第二波受訪者分為實驗組和控制組，據以觀察主動告知前一波的民調結果是否影響第二波的態度或看法，並比較實驗組和控制組的差異，以探討從眾效應是否發生。根據獨立樣本t檢定的結果顯示，從眾效應並未發生，可能是民眾對於這些特定政策議題已經形成既定的想法，才沒有受到多數意見而改變，也可能是調查當年並非選舉年，因此民眾對於議題的關注度不高，也比較沒有表態的意願。未來需要累積更多的個案觀察，才能更加理解策略性民調發布與從眾效應之間的關連性。

關鍵字

選戰；民意調查；從眾效應

並列摘要

In the 1980, Sidney Blumenthal published the book ＂The Permanent Campaign＂. In this book, Blumenthal described how American politics had changed from old-style patronage and party organization to modern technology polling driven by the computer revolution. By using the public polls, the elected leader can not only find out where the majority stand over the dispute public issues, but also lead the climate of opinion. We hypothesized that respondents would change their choices because of the effect of ＂Conformity.＂ In order to testify the hypothesis, we designed a two-stage panel public opinion poll and divided the respondents into experimental group and control group. As the result shows, the hypothesis is rejected. There are two plausible reasoning. One is that people had framed their attitude toward theses policy issues so that they were not easy to change within the influence of the majority. The other is that this polling year wasn't the campaign year, people didn't pay much attention to these public issues, and neither did they have will to express their opinions. In the future, the more the cases we observed, the more we can learn about the relation between the strategic use of poll and the conformity effect.