Occupy Central provocations won't help to build a consensus
Regina Ip says the movement, modelled after the spirit of the American original, will prove too provocative to ever achieve the organisers' purpose of building a consensus here
Hong Kong people who are quick to lambast mainlanders for copying and producing fake products should take a step back and look at their own talents in the counterfeit industry.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the political arena. Taking a leaf from "Occupy Wall Street", academics bent on holding Beijing's feet to the fire are organising an "Occupy Central" movement to pressure the central government to succumb to their demands for "true" democracy.
This movement is slated to comprise four stages - oath-taking by participants, holding of a series of "deliberation days", "citizens' authorisation" of the organisers' electoral proposals, and mobilisation of 10,000 participants to occupy Central in July next year.
To lend authenticity to their movement, organisers are claiming the "deliberation days" are modelled on the "deliberative polling" model pioneered by professors Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, two American academics, in 2002.
Yet Hong Kong's version of "deliberation days" follows the American model in name only. The success of the American programme is contingent on making an honest use of the modern science of public opinion polling, which involves scientific random sampling and designing survey questions aimed at capturing an accurate picture of public opinion.
By contrast, the first deliberation day slated to take place today will comprise 600 participants, including 500 supporters mobilised by the organisers and 100 selected at random. The sample size is clearly too small to enable the true state of public opinion to be gauged. As such, the first deliberation day is more likely to be staged as a propaganda event rather than an honest exercise in public opinion polling.
The American experience of polling in the 2012 presidential election shows that if pollsters are serious about making accurate predictions - as opposed to using polls to feign advantages or make self-fulfilling prophesies - no expense should be spared in constructing a scientific sample representative of likely voters.