About
Introduction
The Hong Kong Election Study (HKES) embarked in 2015, with funding support from the Hong Kong University Grants Committee (GRF Ref. No.: 14615915 and GRF Ref. No.: 15605519). The mission of the project is to systematically collect survey data for empirical study of voting behavior, civic engagement and general political attitudes of the Hong Kong population. Its goal is to provide continual, objective public opinion data based on theory-driven design and non-partisan instrument to answer important substantive questions pertaining to the voting intention, party support, evaluations of governance and other political attitudes.
Development timeline
The HKES survey series started in 2015 targeting the District Council elections. The project adopts new internet survey technology to interview respondents from pre-selected panels. Each survey interviews a representative sample of approximately 2,000 respondents. We commissioned international survey companies to conduct the surveys using instruments designed and pretested by the HKES team.
Instruments
Instruments were built taking reference from other national elections surveys (such as TEDS and BES). The topical categories of questions include:
- Politics and Media
- Political Mobilization and Political Involvement
- Governing Performance
- Political Efficacy and Political Trust
- Attitudes about Elites
- Economic Evaluations
- Opinions about Democracy
- Political Knowledge
- Voting Behavior
- Identity
- Party Identification
- Local issues (e.g. Housing, Patronage)
- Demographics
Sampling and Weighting
Representative samples were selected from the YouGov panels referencing the Hong Kong registered voter population (permanent residents 18 years of age). Raking is selected as the weighting method to adjust the sample representative of the registered voter population. Multiple weights have been created using demographic and geographic variables to represent pre-election, post-election and panel (repeated response from two waves of surveys) samples.