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Every few months, Indian media proclaims that “Modi is the world’s most popular leader,” citing approval numbers from an American firm called Morning Consult. These headlines rest on a single proprietary online tracker whose methods and limitations are rarely scrutinised. It is important to unpack who runs this survey, how it works, and why its numbers – and the screaming headlines it spawns – should be treated with extreme caution.

The figures come from the Global Leader Approval Rating Tracker produced by Morning Consult Political Intelligence, a commercial product of Morning Consult, a US‑based business‑intelligence and polling company founded in 2014. Morning Consult is a privately held, venture‑backed, for‑profit firm; its CEO and co‑founder is Michael Ramlet.

The tracker covers leaders in more than 20 countries, including India, and publishes rolling approval/disapproval numbers based on daily online surveys of adults in each country.

How does their Modi rating work?

The familiar claim that “Modi is the world’s most popular leader” originates in this Global Leader Approval Rating Tracker. For each leader, Morning Consult reports a 7‑day rolling average of responses to a standard question on whether respondents approve or disapprove of the leader’s job performance. The product is designed and marketed as “political intelligence” for corporate and political clients, with only a subset of the data and methodology available freely on their site.

Methodologically, Morning Consult relies on large online surveys drawn from multiple panel providers. These are non‑probability samples: respondents volunteer for online panels rather than being randomly selected from the entire population. The firm then applies weighting by demographics (age, gender, region, education, etc.) using official statistics to make the sample resemble the country’s adult population.

What is wrong with the “Modi is the world’s most popular leader” headline?

Two separate leaps are being made in this claim by the Indian media. One from a single commercial firm’s online tracker to a precise estimate of Indian public opinion, and the other from that one country estimate to a cross‑country league table of global popularity. Both rest on shaky grounds.

First, Morning Consult’s Modi approval series measures the views of online, panel‑reachable Indian adults, not the entire populace. In a country with India’s digital divides, this is a........

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