Archive for October, 2012

Why political polling is dying

Posted in Bad polling on October 17th, 2012 by Leo – Comments Off on Why political polling is dying

Each week, YouGov conduct six political polls for News International. ComRes poll for the Independent about once a fortnight; ICM, MORI and Populus do monthly political polls; Opinium seem to be polling on a weekly basis; and Survation and TNS have irregular but frequent polls.

Compare this with 10 years ago. According to Mark Pack’s list of past political polls, this week in October 2002 had just two polls. Ten years before that, there was one poll in the same week. So political polling now appears in unprecedented health.

But perversely, political polling contains the seeds of its own destruction. Here’s why.

Polls are commissioned for one of two reasons. Either the commissioner wants to know something, or they want someone else to know something.

Most polls are never made public. They’re commissioned by companies that want to know how they’re viewed, or to test ideas, or to see what people think about a question that’s important to them. These are often of little interest to anyone who’s not directly involved, though sometimes they contain some fascinating insights.

However lots of polls are made public. Some of these are by organisations trying to create a story that helps their cause. A recent example was this Populus poll, commissioned by the Tories and credulously reported by the Guardian despite a question sequence carefully designed to give Ed Miliband a bad score.

But most public political polling isn’t done by campaign groups: it’s done by newspapers, and they do it because they want a good story that sells papers. This is where the problem is.

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