Fantastic work! In your post introducing this initiative you wrote that the base rate for passage of ballot initiatives was 11%. A conservative reading of the data here (taking the low value of $20m for development funding raised) seems to indicate a 100:1 return on investment. Taking the base rate, this $10 in effective development aid for $1 spent on advocacy (in expectation). If the development aid is effectively spent, the implication here is that money spent on an initiative like this might be ten times as effective in expectation as money donated directly to a top-rated charity. This assumes, of course, that the base rate is accurate.
In that initial post, you had an exchange with Stefan Schubert about the relevance of your assumed base rate. You discussed the importance of polling at that point but it’s not clear to me where you left off.
This success really seems to highlight the importance of public opinion polling here. The value of information in this domain is very high, since you’re trying to identify the avenue which will provide the greatest leverage. Choosing the wrong avenue has no value, and potentially even minor reputational costs for your organization or for EA in general. Choosing the right avenue has huge upsides.
Public opinion polling seems crucial to this end. In this scenario, prior polling might have allowed you to identify a reasonable figure beforehand (avoiding the $87 million overreach). More importantly, though (if I understand the procedure correctly), it might have enabled you to avoid the counterproposal process and to pinpoint an optimal figure to ask for—perhaps one higher than the one you ultimately got.
I don’t want to diminish the achievement here, which I think is huge; I just want to point out that extremely useful information for this effort can be retrieved from the public at relatively low cost. In the future, this information can be used to reduce the uncertainty around efforts to fund ballot proposals and increase the expected value of these efforts by lowering the probability of failure in expectation.
I agree with the importance of “choosing the right avenue.” I still don’t think public opinion polling is very useful for that purpose (especially if some polling data is already available). In fact, I think public opinion polling would have been unlikely to clearly identify the key issues because the general public has much less pronounced and well-informed opinions than politicians and other stakeholders.
At least for Swiss initiatives, getting reactions/opinions from the responsible legislative body and the people they trust (like local charities in this case) seems much more useful because it shapes the legislative bodies’ official recommendation to voters. I think it was a mistake not to do more of that type of stakeholder engagement in the early stages of the initiative, and that mistake almost led to a complete failure of the initiative.
Also noteworthy: Talking to local politicians is much cheaper still than doing public opinion polls (costs a couple of hours rather than thousands of dollars plus a lot of work to get the polling right).
That said, I think doing some polling before launching an initiative could also be somewhat helpful.
Thanks for your response. I think I should make clear (as I really didn’t do in my initial post) that I mean my comment more broadly: when EAs think about doing ballot initiatives, they should strongly consider doing public opinion polling. In a setting where an EA advocacy group is trying to select (a) which of X effective policies to advocate and (b) in which of Y locales to advocate it, it seems (to me, at least) that polling is cost-effective, since choosing between X*Y potentially large number of independent options is a nontrivial problem that requires a rigorous approach.
In your setting, however (making the binary choice of whether or not to advocate for policy P in location L), I understand why you chose the strategy you did. Your point about the relative cost-effectiveness of talking to local politicians versus conducting an (arguably) expensive poll is well-taken. I don’t have any idea how Swiss referenda work and I conclude from your comment that voters largely follow the lead of their representatives.
I’m not sure how you’re thinking about future efforts along these lines, but if you’re planning on selecting from a longer list of policies and cantons, I think polling—in a cheap way—could challenge your legislative strategy for cost-effectiveness, at least as a guide for initial research investment.
To further clarify: I think in many circumstances (e.g., for a ballot initiative in Switzerland on the federal level), public opinion polling would be crucial. But for this specific type of city-level initiative, I don’t think it would help much.
Fantastic work! In your post introducing this initiative you wrote that the base rate for passage of ballot initiatives was 11%. A conservative reading of the data here (taking the low value of $20m for development funding raised) seems to indicate a 100:1 return on investment. Taking the base rate, this $10 in effective development aid for $1 spent on advocacy (in expectation). If the development aid is effectively spent, the implication here is that money spent on an initiative like this might be ten times as effective in expectation as money donated directly to a top-rated charity. This assumes, of course, that the base rate is accurate.
In that initial post, you had an exchange with Stefan Schubert about the relevance of your assumed base rate. You discussed the importance of polling at that point but it’s not clear to me where you left off.
This success really seems to highlight the importance of public opinion polling here. The value of information in this domain is very high, since you’re trying to identify the avenue which will provide the greatest leverage. Choosing the wrong avenue has no value, and potentially even minor reputational costs for your organization or for EA in general. Choosing the right avenue has huge upsides.
Public opinion polling seems crucial to this end. In this scenario, prior polling might have allowed you to identify a reasonable figure beforehand (avoiding the $87 million overreach). More importantly, though (if I understand the procedure correctly), it might have enabled you to avoid the counterproposal process and to pinpoint an optimal figure to ask for—perhaps one higher than the one you ultimately got.
I don’t want to diminish the achievement here, which I think is huge; I just want to point out that extremely useful information for this effort can be retrieved from the public at relatively low cost. In the future, this information can be used to reduce the uncertainty around efforts to fund ballot proposals and increase the expected value of these efforts by lowering the probability of failure in expectation.
I agree with the importance of “choosing the right avenue.” I still don’t think public opinion polling is very useful for that purpose (especially if some polling data is already available). In fact, I think public opinion polling would have been unlikely to clearly identify the key issues because the general public has much less pronounced and well-informed opinions than politicians and other stakeholders.
At least for Swiss initiatives, getting reactions/opinions from the responsible legislative body and the people they trust (like local charities in this case) seems much more useful because it shapes the legislative bodies’ official recommendation to voters. I think it was a mistake not to do more of that type of stakeholder engagement in the early stages of the initiative, and that mistake almost led to a complete failure of the initiative.
Also noteworthy: Talking to local politicians is much cheaper still than doing public opinion polls (costs a couple of hours rather than thousands of dollars plus a lot of work to get the polling right).
That said, I think doing some polling before launching an initiative could also be somewhat helpful.
Thanks for your response. I think I should make clear (as I really didn’t do in my initial post) that I mean my comment more broadly: when EAs think about doing ballot initiatives, they should strongly consider doing public opinion polling. In a setting where an EA advocacy group is trying to select (a) which of X effective policies to advocate and (b) in which of Y locales to advocate it, it seems (to me, at least) that polling is cost-effective, since choosing between X*Y potentially large number of independent options is a nontrivial problem that requires a rigorous approach.
In your setting, however (making the binary choice of whether or not to advocate for policy P in location L), I understand why you chose the strategy you did. Your point about the relative cost-effectiveness of talking to local politicians versus conducting an (arguably) expensive poll is well-taken. I don’t have any idea how Swiss referenda work and I conclude from your comment that voters largely follow the lead of their representatives.
I’m not sure how you’re thinking about future efforts along these lines, but if you’re planning on selecting from a longer list of policies and cantons, I think polling—in a cheap way—could challenge your legislative strategy for cost-effectiveness, at least as a guide for initial research investment.
Fully agreed, thanks for the clarification!
To further clarify: I think in many circumstances (e.g., for a ballot initiative in Switzerland on the federal level), public opinion polling would be crucial. But for this specific type of city-level initiative, I don’t think it would help much.