Non-Partisan Polling Questions: Advisory Council
How do we ask good polling questions? How do we ask non-partisan polling questions? It can be harder than it appears. Previously, I discussed good and bad polling questions. Since AmericaThinks is the messenger – not the message – it is especially important that we commit to fair and balanced polls.
As are many things in life, there is wisdom in a multitude of counselors. In this case, our Advisory Council is wisdom. The Advisory Council will assist with leading a neutral conversation on the topics of the day. The Advisory Council is not just window dressing. We need active and diverse viewpoints to shield us from inadvertently asking bad questions and helping to minimize our preventable mistakes.
The following is our initial framework for the Advisory Council. No doubt this will change over time, but we will attempt to correct issues and explain new ideas as we go along.
The current members of our Advisory Council will be listed on our website and will be comprised of thought leaders that are recognized contributors in the areas of culture and politics. These leaders will believe in and encourage unity and conversation about important topics in America. Their role is to provide commentary, suggestions, and a general review of polling questions using their own unique, varied, and thoughtful perspectives and life experiences. Their advice is crucial to providing insight, accountability, and a true non-partisan viewpoint for AmericaThinks polls.
The Advisory Council will suggest, review, and discuss possible poll topics and questions prior to publication. They may suggest polling questions and give unsolicited feedback on any aspect of polling questions. AmericaThinks will review feedback, improve the question based on the council feedback, and optionally send it back to the council for another review. When the consensus of the council is that the question is a good question to poll, then AmericaThinks will publish the question for response. Advisory Council feedback may be optionally published to provide public insight into the decision-making process.
Advisory Council members will be invited to join with AmericaThinks for one-year renewable terms. Potential members will be invited from public politics, media, academia, technology, and traditional polling organizations. Criteria for selection will include:
a long-held conviction to build a better future,
a commitment to representative democracy,
an understanding of the times,
a careful and thoughtful consideration of each issue, and
a desire to promote and support common values.
Next, we are planning to build functionality to gather polling question suggestions from AmericaThinks participants. This feature is still in the design stages and will be implemented sometime after the initial launch. We believe that AmericaThinks participants will have many good suggestions for polling questions. We want input from people with a wide variety of expertise, perspectives, and life experiences. Participants will be able to suggest a question, possible answers, and any reference links to support their question. That is the easy part.
The hard part will be making sense of the suggestions. We plan to collect the suggestions, use context-based AI to perform initial classification and weed out any obvious unacceptable content. Suggestions will then be collected into a searchable database that can be queried. Topics will be tallied to find trending or important issues to be addressed. If we find that we can collect high-quality suggestions, then we plan to publish those suggestions so that everyone can see what topics are trending and are important to America. Our hope is that participants can actively shape the polling questions asked by AmericaThinks.
So, our plan in a nutshell is to spread responsibility for polling questions and topics to a broader community. All in all, we believe that this will result in fair and balanced polls.