The corruption investigations against Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and the VP now throw a new light on the “Kurz effect” in the opinion polls of May 2017. After the current Chancellor took over the leadership of the VP, the VP was able to deficit FP and SP Turn into a head start in all polls. This effect was somewhat more pronounced in the Research Affairs institute, which is now suspected of being manipulated.
Graphic: The development of the survey values at Research Affairs and other survey institutes in comparison
Short effect not equally strong everywhere
In the months before Kurz took over the leadership of the VP, the then black party was consistently in third place. The first since mid-2015 was the FP before the SP, which has been gaining ground since Christian Kern took over in May 2016.
With Mitterlehner’s resignation and the change to Kurz, the VP suddenly shot up. The gap on the SP of up to ten percentage points tipped into a clear lead. As a review of the polls published at the time – collected by the neuwal.com initiative – shows, this effect was noticeable at all institutes. It was a bit more pronounced in the first few weeks at “Research Affairs”, the institute of opinion researcher Sabine Beinschab.
Political scientist Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik from the University of Vienna recently referred to this. “On average, the VP at this institute under the chairmanship of Mitterlehner is worse than at the other institutes. And when the change to Kurz happens, this penalty is gone and the VP is then significantly better,” he said on Tuesday in the “ZiB2”.
In fact, in the surveys published by the daily newspaper “sterreich”, Research Affairs shows values below 20 percent for the VP among Mitterlehner, while the party scores slightly better at other institutes. For example, on three consecutive days of published surveys in March 2017, the VP for Research Affairs was 19, Unique Research 22 and Market 20 percent. After the takeover by Kurz, the picture turns into the opposite: Research Affairs shows the highest value for the “turquoise” VP with 35 percent – the other institutes are behind with 31 to 33 percent.
The differences between the institutes become even clearer if one also takes into account the values of the immediate chancellor competitor SP. Because in May and June 2017 this was between 26 and 28 percent for the other institutes, but only 20 to 23 percent for Research Affairs. These surveys thus confirmed that VP had a lead of up to 15 percentage points, while the difference between VP and SP at the other institutes was only a maximum of eight percentage points.
Leg scraper could not be reached at the request of the APA and has not yet issued a statement on the investigation. For them, as for Kurz and his employees, the presumption of innocence applies.
