Bank-sponsored opinion polls: welcome addition, or insider trading?

Making predictions about Brazilian politics is a thankless and often useless task. After the endless unforeseen twists and turns of the 2013 street protests, 2014 election, and Congress’s impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, many commentators have rightly adopted a strict ‘wait and see’ attitude with regards to future events. The only forecasters which have remained credible over these turbulent years are the country’s two leading pollsters: Datafolha and Ibope.

With election season in full swing and the country heading to the polls in less than a month, opinion polls have once again taken center stage in the political debate. The big two of Datafolha and Ibope have proven their consistency and ability to successfully map voting trends, but in this election there are new players on the polling scene, namely investment banks and other financial agents, who have begun commissioning and publishing their own opinion polls.

While newsworthy, these investment bank polls have not won over the public for their reliability, first and foremost due to their methodology. While Datafolha and Ibope conduct face-to-face interviews, these other institutes carry out their polls over the phone, often with automated messages and randomized samples. At an investigative journalism conference in São Paulo in June, one of Ibope’s executives complained about this type of research, calling the finished products “surveys, not polls.”

Before the start of the campaign, The Brazilian Report staff writer Diogo Rodriguez explored the phenomenon of telephone polls and whether they can be useful in today’s electoral environment.

However, regardless of whether polls commissioned by investment banks are deemed to be reliable, they do have significant effects on financial markets. A poll commissioned by...