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A telephone survey was conducted from 19 to 26 June 2018 by the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) to gauge public opinions on the ratings of the Chief Executive Carrie Lam.  712 respondents aged 18 or above were successfully interviewed, with a response rate of 38.9%.  The sampling error is + or –3.67 percentage points at a confidence level of 95%.

Major findings are summarized as follows:

The respondents were asked to rate the performance of the Chief Executive Carrie Lam (with a point scale ranging from 0 to 100 and 50 as the passing mark) on ten different aspects. The survey results showed that Carrie Lam received higher than passing mark on eight of those ten aspects. Among them, she got the highest rating (mean score) on “Competence” (59.5), followed by “Trustworthy” (56.3), “Incorruptible”(56.1),“Tolerance of different political forces”(55.7), “Caring the plights of the people”(53.5),“Improve Hong Kong economic development”(53.3),“Balance the interests of Mainland and Hong Kong”(52.4), and “Balance the interests of different parties”(51.6). The two items that Carrie Lam got lower than passing mark were “Protect freedom and human right of Hong Kong”(49.0) and “Promote further development of democracy in Hong Kong”(44.5).

Further ANOVA analysis revealed that the ratings of the respondents showed significant differences among different age groups and subjective social class groups. For age groups, those aged 51 or above generally gave higher ratings on all the aspects than other age groups. On the contrary, the ratings of those aged from 18 to 30 were the lowest among all groups. In fact, this group only gave higher than passing mark on one item: Carrie Lam’s “Competence”. For subjective social class groups, significant differences were found on six aspects: “Incorruptible”, “Competence”, “Tolerance of different political forces”, “Improve Hong Kong economic development”, “Protect freedom and human right of Hong Kong”, and “Promote further development of democracy in Hong Kong”. Those self-classified as “middle upper class/upper class” tended to give higher ratings than other groups while those self-classified as “lower class/lower middle class” gave lower ratings than other groups for those six items. No significant difference of ratings was found for gender group and education level group.