Allensbach Institute
The Institute for Allensbach - Society for the Study of public opinion mbH ( IfD ) based in Allensbach am Bodensee was founded in 1947 by Elisabeth Noelle - Neumann and is the oldest research institute in Germany. Since 1988, Renate Kocher is the managing director until 2010 on the side of the founder. The Institute has offices in Bonn and Berlin. Among the 95 employees are 25 scientists. The approximately 2,000 part-time interviewers are recruited from all walks of life. It is considered as belonging to the conservative political spectrum. In addition to the Opinion Research Institute (among others with the studies Allensbacher market and advertising medium analysis ( AWA), Allensbacher Computer and Technology Analysis ( ACTA), toplevel ) also works in the field of media research. As the only German Institute Allensbach not work with random sampling but with ratio method, but thus achieves similar results to its competitors.
Reception
As only one of the five major German opinion research institutes Allen Bach is in the Sunday question of values for the parties in Dezimalstellenbereich, although the error range is from this type of survey in the range of two to three percentage points. For public criticism attended surveys on state elections in Baden- Württemberg in 1992 and state elections in Baden- Württemberg in 1996, for which the institution the poll numbers of the party ansetzte The Republicans far too low. Allen Bach predicted 4.5 and 4 percent share of the vote. The actual election results of the Republicans, however, were 10.9 and 9.1 percent. In an interview on the incidents Renate Kocher said something that she had expected a higher result due to ascending values in the polls. Man but I can not know for sure at the time whether this rising trend is reliable. We have therefore decided to only with the raw data ( 4.5 percent) to go public. To do otherwise would have been interpreted in retrospect as an attempt to talk up the Republicans. This approach came in journalism and science criticism. In an interview with the SWF quiver replied: "We did not by the publication of the survey data before choosing a sensation create in the sense that (sic) then everyone would have only talked about the Republicans. "
Shortly before the federal election in 2013 claimed Bernd Lucke, a spokesman for the alternative for Germany ( AFD ), in an interview with Handelsblatt that Allensbach were available raw data, which would see the AfD well over five percent. Renate Kocher rejected the allegations and said that the AfD would 've never been to the gross sales nearly five percent. The polling institute Forsa, the gap made the same accusation, then procured on 17 September 2013, the Cologne Regional Court for an injunction against Lucke, within which this was forbidden under pain of administrative fine of up to 250,000 euros, to repeat his statement.
The proximity between Elisabeth Noelle - Neumann and Helmut Kohl led to negative reviews.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger designated 1965 the Institute as an oracle from Lake Constance, when he saw a "structural similarity with the mantic practices of the Old World ." " Demoscopic surveys are generally added in order: the ignorant man brings the priests of Allensbach its offerings, and stresses that his questions. The Pythia does not answer on your own, they are the questions to a higher court, at the voice of God, the " representative cross-section ", in the jargon of the pollsters. "