UST students see Miriam as most competent on issues affecting country

MANILA, Philippines - Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago was viewed as the presidential candidate most competent in handling most of the issues affecting the country, a survey conducted by the University of Santo Tomas (UST) showed.

Santiago was perceived as the most capable of responding to 18 of the 26 issues covered by the Thomasian Initiatives for Good Election Results (TIGER) poll by the UST Research Center on Culture, Education and Social Issues.

Among the issues that Santiago ranked first in are high taxes, high prices, wages for workers and professionals, population growth, mass transport, and LGBT rights.

Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, meanwhile, was viewed as the most competent in handling seven issues, most of them related to security. The tough-talking mayor bested other candidates in the issues of graft and corruption in government, peace process in Mindanao, traffic congestion, illegal drugs and heinous crimes, garbage and flooding, slow government response in disaster-affected areas, and threats of terrorism.

Meanwhile, most of the respondents think Sen. Grace Poe is most competent in handling the poor healthcare program of the country.

Liberal Party presidential candidate Manuel Roxas II and Vice President Jejomar Binay were the least priority of the respondents in terms of the issues enumerated.

The poll about Thomasians’ perceptions on the competence of presidential bets is one of the four election surveys conducted by the UST Research Center on Culture, Education and Social Issues.

The survey, which employed an issue-based design, was conducted from Feb. 27 to March 5 and had 1,265 respondents. Data was gathered through free online survey creator Google Forms, social networking sites and e-mail correspondence. To ensure the authenticity of data, the questionnaires included student numbers, which were cross-checked with the master list of students from the UST registrar.

Respondents were asked: Among the presidential candidates, who is the most competent in handling the following issues?

Clarence Batan, director of the UST Research Center on Culture, Education and Social Issues, said the survey sought to determine the issues that are important to the respondents.

“In adopting a research-based, issue-based approach, you could actually gauge the reason why respondents are voting for someone. We always have the tendency to ask someone whom he will vote for but never asked the issues that are important to him,” Batan told The STAR in an interview.

Many of us think that when we’re talking about elections, we’re talking about persons. We’re missing the whole point. You are saying that we are personality-based because the information from surveys are about persons, not about issues,” he added.

Batan said their survey attempted to understand what issues matter to the youth and how the issues shaped their electoral choices.

Meanwhile, majority of UST students who participated in two issue-based surveys enumerated graft and corruption in government, poor healthcare program and slow government response in disaster-affected areas as the three most important issues in the country.

Batan said the importance given to graft and corruption may be related to access to information.

“You can see that there is conditioning of the mind that this is our problem and we talk about it. It’s a byproduct of the social media machinery,” Batan said.

“I think it’s not just about the government itself but rather graft and corruption in many dimensions of one’s life,” he added.

Miriam, Rody top polls

Santiago and Duterte also emerged as frontrunners in four UST surveys conducted from the last week of February to the third week of April.

In the first survey conducted from Feb. 27 to March 5, half or 50 percent of the 1,256 online respondents chose Santiago while 27 percent picked Duterte. Poe ranked third with five percent while Roxas and Binay got three percent and one percent, respectively. Fourteen percent of the respondents did not choose any candidate.

In the second survey, Duterte emerged as the frontrunner with 41 percent followed by Santiago with 32 percent. Poe remained at third place with six percent while Roxas and Binay were chosen by five percent and one percent of respondents, respectively. Fifteen percent of respondents chose to abstain or were undecided. The second poll was conducted from March 29 to April 8 and had 678 respondents.

Duterte topped the third survey with 49 percent while Santiago landed on second place with 34 percent. Poe was preferred by six percent of the respondents while the ratings of Roxas and Binay were unchanged at five percent and one percent, respectively. Five percent of the respondents did not have a preference or were undecided. The data for the third poll came from 2,354 respondents and were gathered from April 4 to 9.

Santiago surged in the fourth survey with 56 percent, dislodging Duterte as survey frontrunner. The Davao City mayor slid to 29 percent while Roxas ranked third with five percent. Poe dropped to fourth place with four percent while Binay got two percent. Five percent of respondents abstained from the poll. The fourth survey was conducted from April 20 to 23 and had 7,159 respondents.

The TIGER surveys found a relationship between the UST online respondents’ level of importance of identified issues ad their choice for president.

“Four TIGER surveys direct attention to the relative connection between the Thomasian online respondents’ level of importance /preference of identified issues and their choices,” the UST Research Center on Culture, Education and Social Issues said in a report.

“This finding contradicts the observation that Filipinos mainly vote based on personality,” it added.