The Liberia Elections 2023 hold immense significance for the nation’s democratic journey, and this poll seeks to provide valuable insights into the perspectives, concerns, and aspirations of the Liberian people, fostering transparency and accountability within the electoral process.

Key Findings: Liberia 2023 Elections Survey

State of the Nation:

• The survey reflects a lack of confidence in the government’s capacity to address Liberia’s challenges, with 65.85% expressing low to very low trust levels.
• A significant majority (78.3%) perceive corruption as prevalent within the government and public institutions.
• The survey portrays a challenging socio-economic landscape, with 81% describing the current state of poverty as severe.
• Employment challenges are prevalent, as nearly 92% find it challenging to secure stable work.

Women in Leadership:

• 84.88% of respondents believe there is a need for more representation of women in political and leadership roles.

ECOWAS Awareness:

• 63.9% are aware to some degree of the role and importance of ECOWAS in the region, highlighting the need for continued public awareness efforts.

2023 Elections:

• 54.15% of respondents feel “very much informed” about the forthcoming elections.
• Radio (72.93%) and social media (71.95%) are the primary sources of election-related information.
• Confidence in the fairness and transparency of the election process is diverse, with 40.7% expressing low confidence levels.

Voter Registration and Turnout:

• An overwhelming 98% of respondents are registered voters, with 99% planning to vote in the upcoming elections.

Factors Influencing Voter Choices:

• Leadership qualities (92%), experience (72%), and policies (66%) are pivotal factors in candidate selection, while tribe (14%) and party affiliation (11%) have lesser influence.

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Interactive Dashboard:

Dive deeper into the survey findings in the interactive dashboard below, which enables you to filter each question’s results by gender, age group and county.

Methodology and Assumptions

The 2023 Liberian Elections opinion poll was conducted from August 20 to October 3, 2023, encompassing all counties in Liberia through mobile web. GeoPoll Mobile web surveys are sent to respondents via an initial text message or other channel containing a link to a mobile web survey. Mobile web surveys are popular because they allow for more complex question types than SMS. While they require the respondent to have a data (internet) connection, they do not require a smartphone.

However, considering that this survey was conducted via mobile web links, please be aware that it may not be fully representative of the Liberian population. The sample predominantly comprises connected or online individuals, which may introduce bias towards more educated, urban demographics, potentially underrepresenting less affluent, illiterate, elderly, or populations without access to internet-enabled phones.

A stratified random sampling approach considered geographic (all counties), age (18-24: 13%, 25-35: 48% and 36+: 38%), and gender (68% Males and 32% Females) representation. The sample size was 410 respondents. Advanced statistical analysis was employed to aggregate and interpret the data.

For more information about this survey, our capabilities or to request for data files, please contact us. 

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The survey targeted medium and large businesses in Liberia that paid and filed relevant business taxes. The overall goal of the survey was to better understand the perceptions and experiences that Liberia’s business taxpayers had filing and paying taxes with the Liberian Revenue Authority. Before the survey was full implemented in September 2017, GeoPoll performed a series of tests via text message (SMS) to better understand the target sample.

Selecting Survey Modes

Once GeoPoll understood the complexities and sensitivities of the study as well as the limited sample size of business taxpayers, GeoPoll initially recommended to the use of Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) as the mode for the project. However, after a number of discussions with DAI RG3 team members, the team agreed that GeoPoll would test the survey via SMS to gain insight if response rates increased after changing key factors with implementation of the survey, despite the complex and sensitive nature of the survey’s subject matter.

Beginning in July 2017, GeoPoll tested a SMS survey with 39 questions with advanced conditional logic and routing of respondents. The sample GeoPoll utilized initially consisted of 1,756 business taxpayers in Liberia, with an additional 120 eligible respondents being added after several DAI RG3 programmatic events that invited taxpayers. The majority of these sample members had been previously contacted by GeoPoll through informative one-way messages, but were not pre-notified directly regarding the survey nor had the majority of the sample previously take a SMS survey on GeoPoll’s platform. These factors were an important characteristic of the sample, since prior engagement and pre-notification of a survey are all empirically proven to increase response rates, especially if pre-notification of a survey occurs within the same mode.

For approximately a month and a half, from July until the conclusion at the end of August, GeoPoll tested:

• The frequency of reminder messages to respondents as well as sending the initial survey invitation message different times throughout the day and different days of the week.
• Increased airtime incentive amounts from five USD to 10 USD. GeoPoll offers a small airtime incentive for all of its surveys, but this amount is normally significantly less than five USD.
• Different wording of the Opt-in messages to garner more attention from potential respondents.
• Additionally, towards the end of testing, DAI RG3 staff made direct calls to a portion of the respondents in the sample to ask them to take the survey they received via SMS.

Testing Results

The SMS testing confirmed GeoPoll’s original suggestion that SMS would not be a functional mode for a study with a very limited sample and a sensitive topic. Due to the specific targeting of this survey, GeoPoll saw much lower response rates than seen with other SMS survey projects. Although nearly 60 sample members initially engaged with the opt-in message, only four completed the survey entirely. These results allowed GeoPoll and the DAI RG3 Team to make the collective decision to switch entirely to CATI for the full implementation.

The Survey

In the final stage of the project, GeoPoll utilized a sample of approximately 3,000 medium and large business tax payers in Liberia to conduct a 41 question CATI survey, achieving 506 completed surveys. CATI is a survey method by which data is collected by an interviewer through calling phone numbers to reach respondents, asking them questions from a computerized script and recording the data electronically on a computer. CATI software is customizable and allows for researchers to control the flow of a survey based on a respondent’s answers to questions, as well as information already known about the respondent. The benefits of this mode include:

• Interviewers allow for in depth probing to complex/difficult questions.
• Interviewers are able to gauge respondent understanding of questions, and probe for clarification if needed, and ensure appropriate responses are given.
• The mode reaches populations that are not as accessible using other modes.

These benefits made CATI an ideal mode for conducting a very targeted survey on a complex and sensitive topic such as filing taxes.

Impact Assessed

An initial assessment of the data displays that business taxpayers in Liberia believe that many of filing processes are burdensome, although the majority of respondents noted that it only took one or two hours to file their respective returns. However, the majority of respondents had problems filing their business taxes due to the tax s system being down or because the wait at the Liberian Revenue Authority was too long. DAI’s RG3 program and GeoPoll will continue to analyze the data and results yielded from this unique study.

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Jeremy Bowles (PhD student in Government at Harvard University) and Horacio Larreguy (Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University) are conducting a study in partnership with GeoPoll using CATI to understand how perceptions of candidates to the Liberian House of Representatives are affected by a series of debates held ahead of the October 10 general election. What is CATI and what are the best practices in CATI project implementation?

The study is conducted in partnership with United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the USAID-funded Internews Liberia Media Development (LMD) project, and NORC at the University of Chicago, an objective non-partisan research institution. Through a baseline and end-line survey across all 73 electoral districts in Liberia, GeoPoll is administering a survey through computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) that tracks perceptions of district-level candidates before and after the 2017 general election.

What is CATI?
CATI is a method of mobile data collection through which live enumerators call a respondent on their mobile phone and administer the survey live with the respondent. The study leaders and GeoPoll determined CATI as the preferred mobile data collection method due to logistical and financial conditions that did not allow for an in-person survey, concerns that an SMS survey would limit the length of the survey, and the politically-sensitive nature of the questions. 

How do we decide on CATI?
During the design stage of any project, GeoPoll works with its project partners to assess which mode is most appropriate for the project’s end goal. CATI is frequently advantageous in situations where the target beneficiary group may be illiterate, or when the survey covers a complex or sensitive topic.

CATI Best Practices
Launching the CATI center in Liberia for this project highlights several best practices in CATI project implementation, especially on projects aimed at reaching hard-to-reach populations: 

1. Understand the mode most appropriate for the target beneficiary population at the design stage. In instances where the survey covers complex or sensitive topics, a live call survey method may encourage a higher response rate than another method of mobile survey data collection.
2. For a location-based study, understand how to reach respondents at their verified specific location. This project aims to reach respondents at a very specific location – their electoral district – which was not pre-identifiable in the GeoPoll database. Through a survey design that includes routing CATI enumerators to a list of possible electoral districts per county, GeoPoll was able to locate users at this specific sub-location to assure that the candidate they were referencing was that respondent’s district candidate.
3. In survey design, understand how the target population will interpret political questions. For instance, what type of voting information will respondents have on hand? Will respondents know their voting center or candidate names? This information is necessary to ensure respondents’ ability to answer questions accurately.

Project Implementation
To implement the Liberia Candidate Debates survey, GeoPoll set up a CATI calling center specifically for the project.  Steps GeoPoll took to set up the CATI center included: 

1. GeoPoll hired approximately 25 Liberian enumerators and call managers. Local enumerators are important in CATI so that calls are done in the local language and dialect;
2. GeoPoll CATI implementation specialists traveled to Monrovia to train the local enumerators and set up data collection and quality control systems;
3. Utilizing the GeoPoll database, which has more than 1 million mobile phone users in Liberia, enumerators called up to 300 phone numbers per day, which were pre-stratified by county in Liberia. The respondent’s particular electoral district within that county was then confirmed through questions in the survey;
4. The baseline survey assessed respondents’ levels of political information, knowledge of particular political topics, preferences over policy issues in the local district, and voting intentions. Respondents were asked if they had listened to the district-level candidate debates, what the most important issue was in their district, and which Representative running in their district they planned to vote for. As with all GeoPoll surveys, all answers to the survey are confidential. These perceptions will be compared to the results of a post-survey after the election.

GeoPoll completed the baseline survey of nearly 5,000 respondents prior to the election; the end-line survey is currently under way. Watch for future installments of this blog post series to see the later stages of the project.

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In August of 2014, as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was spreading, the WFP once again partnered with GeoPoll to conduct food security surveys in Ebola-affected countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Ebola is likely to have long-term effects on food security, and mobile surveys allow WFP to quickly collect vital data on food prices, wages, and more.SolutionWFP and GeoPoll will send mobile surveys in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea over three months: September, October, and November 2014, to gather common indicators of food security, plus data on food prices and wages. GeoPoll and the WFP have worked together to adapt the reduced Coping Strategies Index (rCSI) for the mobile phone, and in previous studies have found no significant difference in rCSI results collected through mobile surveys vs. face-to-face surveys.ResultsThe first round of data released is from Sierra Leone, and indicates that food security in the Ebola-epicenters of Kailahun and Kenema has declined since the outbreak began. People living in these areas are using “severe” food coping strategies more frequently than those in the surrounding areas, meaning they are restricting meal size and buying less expensive foods than they normally would. The Sierra Leone surveys, conducted by text message, also found that casual wages in the east of Sierra Leone have dropped, likely contributing to the poor food security situation.

Food prices in the east of Sierra Leone are not showing major differences from prices in other regions of Sierra Leone, however WFP will continue to monitor price trends as surveys continue.Key Points

• WFP And GeoPoll Adapted Key Food Security Surveys For The Mobile Phone.
• Currently Monitoring Food Security, Food Prices, And Wages In Ebola-Affected Areas In Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea.
• Initial Results Found That Ebola-Epicenters In Sierra Leone Are Worse Off In Terms Of Food Security Than Surrounding Areas.

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