"Although the share of countries with limits on the publication of pre-election polls has dropped to 46%, an additional 24 countries (15%) do not permit election polling at all. Governments in one-third of countries officially regulate polls. More than one in four countries have taboos on publishing surveys about religion, and one in five reject polling on crime and on voting. Many countries do not have access to in-country training in survey research. In 43% of the 157 countries, the quality of reporting about polls in the news media is rated as somewhat or very low quality, nearly twice as high as the share of countries who see local journalistic reporting as of somewhat or very high quality. Polling itself has become more difficult due to budget cuts, increased costs of data collection, and lowered response rates.
Regions like Latin America stand out as different in many areas. Latin America has the highest share of countries with pre-election poll embargoes. Nearly all countries report embargoes, and it is the region where embargoes are the longest on average (the median embargo length is seven days, though polling is more accurate the closer to election day it is conducted). In addition, more than any other region, Latin American countries report that personal interviewing is not safe. Nearly half of countries there (47%) believe that interviewers conducting face-to-face surveys are either somewhat or very unsafe, almost three times the global percentage. Europe is the region with the second largest percentage of embargoes (behind Latin America), but for half of those countries, the restrictions on publication last only two or three days. European countries, as well as those in Sub-Saharan Africa and North America & the Caribbean, are also the most likely to have professional associations to deal with complaints about polling and to promulgate standards. While it appears from the tables that parts of Asia Pacific Oceania and Sub-Saharan Africa might not have pre-election restrictions on the publication of polls, in nearly a third of those countries in West Asia & North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, it is not permitted to publish polls about elections and voting (in about a quarter of countries in those two regions, polls about voting cannot even be conducted)." (Executive summary)