At work we meet them, more and more often, the truth. I mean surveys, barometers and all kinds of opinion measurements. Maybe they haven't multiplied that much in number, but they did in terms of the importance and media attention they've received. They're the favorite lunch for mass media gatherings.

Sometimes they make us angry, because in the way we approach the issue and in the very formulation of the questions we perceive the political dimension. In most cases, I do not know if we are sufficiently aware of the performative capacity of surveys, that is, they serve not only to measure or analyze reality, but also to create and transform reality. To take a daily example, let's say that for dinner we have to choose between two restaurants, one full of people and one half empty. Where do you think we're going to play? The principle of "People Where, I Go," also works in politics. Not all the decisions we make in life are too meditated, and thinking that most of them are of one opinion or another or that they are going to win this or another party is nothing bad. Surveys focus on this.

It seems that the media have also realised this. In addition to promoting their own research, after passing through their sieve there are also those carried out by other institutions, emphasizing what they want and what they want. And, of course, we swallow them through the evidence or the objective tone that comes out of the results of an investigation.

It is widespread that each media has its own editorial line and that news is treated accordingly, but antibodies prior to the surveys are not so developed. Therefore, if demographic data can serve to channel public opinion and condition political behaviour, we are faced with an instrument to increase media power.

We also know little about the way the research is conducted. They give us data about the sample, the time and the margin of error, but not about the famous work of “cooking”, that is, how they make estimates and deviations with dubious answers. I find this information interesting in the studies paid with public money, as it seems to me that transparency should be an essential feature and that, on the other hand, they should have absolute rigour in providing data.

In the last EiTB Focus held before the autonomous elections of the CAV, for example, it became news that the last seat of Álava could be dancing between the PNV and Citizens, which was given an informative interest, we were even confirmed that it could be 100 votes apart. In the news and current tertulias, he spent a week pulling and throwing the data, and not any week: the week of the elections. Without much knowledge of sociology, anyone can guess that the fact that a data is confirmed in such detail taking into account the margin of error and the percentage of doubts, is not very well founded, and that the length of a seat may be around a handful of votes may influence the votes received by the two parties in that territory.

The latter have been the “naphinometer” and the Euskobarometer. Perhaps for the publication of this article some other is intercalated. Each of them deserves an extraordinary analysis, but these are great waters and on this occasion I have to be content with expressing my unknowns.