Marta Lagos is Dinerman Award chilean pollster who has created a number of organizations: founding director of Latinobarómetro; founding director of MORI ( Chile ) S.A. Market and Opinion Research International, founding co director of Globalbarómetro.org, founding member of CSES Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.
She is algo member of several organizations: Steerring Committee of the World Value Survey, member of the editorial board of “Pesamiento Iberoaméricano”, former member of the editorial board of IJPOR International Journal of Public Opinion Research among others.
DESCRIBING IS NOT EXPLAINING
A mountain of information perfectly described may well confuse the vision of reality not allowing to distinguish the important, the urgent, the determinant, the driver. The purpose of continuing to produce surveys is to allow to monitor the evolution of social phenomena, understand its drivers and be able to explain behavior.
Surveys cannot anticipate a given event, but if properly applied, they are able to grasp a behavior in a time and place in such a way that reflect behavior before it changes again. It is so that polls have anticipated election results for decades after the second world war in stable political situations. They measure voting behavior very near the election and this voting does not change significantly on Election Day.
Explaining electoral behavior is at the core of explaining societies. If polls lately have not been able to know what electoral behavior is going to be, it is not only because societies are changing, but also because short cuts are taken deviating from ordotox method risking integrity.
If with the help of polls we can explain electoral behavior then we can also understand politics, democracy, economic expectations, social capital, civic society and societies as a whole.