A Barometer of Europe-ness

Ever since 1972, the EU's executive arm has been spending large sums of money on polls of its member country citizens.

It spent $22 million on doing it last year.  It's an intriguing idea...almost a government by real-time referendum. 

So far, the polling has been used in a standard marketing context, primarily as a tool for positioning and selling newly-passed laws and government programs.  An example would be the daily tracking of receptivity to the Euro when it was first introduced.  But commissioner Margot Wallstrom has proposed using the Eurobarometer polls while policies are being formulated and agreed upon.

I'm not sure that it'll work that way.

Opinion polling is just what it says it is: a poll of opinions, taken at a specific moment in time, in a particular manner.  It is a knowledge tool that is as inexorably tied to the context of its conduct as it's disconnected from the behaviors that occur before or during  its execution (or might follow, for that matter).

It's a snapshot of not a moment, but a moment as imaged and expressed by individuals.  It's representative of reality, not really real.

We know this because they're so often wrong.  Or just nuts. 

If they worked, we'd know which politicians would win elections (we rarely do), and it would be a helluva lot easier to sell new products (it isn't).  The Eurobarometer itself once found a vast majority of respondents approving of collective action against terrorism, even when only half of them "approved" of the EU in the first place.

Even the best-intentioned people say one thing, and often do another.  Opinions are less evidence of a priori facts, and more the subjective outcome (or translation) of deeper, sometimes more complicated truths.  Change the inputs, and the outputs change also.

Or maybe they don't.  Poll results can be graphed over time on a chart, and thus suggest momentum or consistency.  But it’s a chimera.  Discreet events presented next to each other are still discreet events.

I sense in the Eurobarometer some struggle for legitimacy.  Being a government of governments and all isn't particularly representative of the individual voters' will. 

But an opinion poll is about one half-step removed from hosting a chat room.  Don't the member countries have elections?  Couldn't EU-level issues get presented and voted upon -- and thus provide the much sought-after mandates -- that the Eurobarometer hopes to find instead?