Polls, politics and perestroika: the emergence of political opinion polling in Central and Eastern Europe

In advanced Capitalist Democracies, political opinion polls are usually seen as objective, reliable tools for determining the 'will of the people'. This article presents the results of a survey conducted throughout 1990, of the opinion polling community in 8 (formerly one-party) states of Central and Eastern Europe, and of Bulgaria in 1992. The survey was concerned with monitoring the changing status and role of polling in the context of political democratisation and political restructuring. The analysis sets out to consider the degree to which polling as an institutional process is dependent upon the political regime in a given state, and also the degree of 'democratisation' which exists there