Public opinion informs decision making in the ministry of education

In the past few weeks, the Ministry of Education has curiously managed to hold two opinions polls without announcing that they were opinion polls, and without spending a single cent on any of them. The result is that this institution has got the findings that have informed two key decisions that will have long term effect on education in this country.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Howard Kunreuther have written on how opinion polls can be used by policy makers to make decisions. In a paper titled ‘Decision-Making Under Social Pressure: The Political Economy of Debating Socially Sensitive Issues’, they assert that in democratic societies, policymakers often rely on public opinion to make political decisions. The phrase ‘political decisions’ is critical here, and it points to what this column stated a few weeks ago: the constitution may have helped us get rid of Cabinet Secretaries (CS) appointed from elected politicians, but it has not succeeded in getting rid of politics from the technocracy.