The Guardian view on flawed election forecasts: polls apart
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Version 0 of 1. Election campaigns are supposed to interrogate alternative futures, but the interrogation necessarily concentrates on those futures that look more likely. That means that there is a feedback loop between expectations of the election result and the election agenda. Green proposals for a swingeing wealth tax or Lib Dem ideas about decriminalising drugs were, for example, never going to dominate the airwaves, because nobody ever expected either party to be able to steamroller its whole programme through. But neither, more poignantly, did many expect the majority Conservative government which has now come to pass. Had the forecasts been different, then the nightly news bulletins would surely have concentrated rather more on the vast spending cuts to come, and rather less on the potential role of Scottish nationalists in a hung parliament. That might have influenced the result. Indeed, had the Tories been confident of winning outright, they might have written a different manifesto: the near-absolute bar on tax rises and the shambolic commitment to rewrite human rights law would have been useful bargaining chips in a coalition haggle; they are millstones around the neck of a majority government. And the reason, of course, why expectations were so wide of the mark is that the opinion polls failed. That failure is not merely shaming for the pollsters and embarrassing for media outfits – the Guardian included – which relied on them; it also arguably subverted the way the whole campaign played out. There might be a temptation to give up on polling entirely, but that would be an over-reaction. As well as getting the single most important fact of the election wrong – predicting a dead heat between the Conservatives and Labour, when the Tories came out a chunky 6.6 points ahead – the polls got several other things right: the SNP sweep, the Ukip vote and the Lib Dem collapse. The seven decades or so of regular polling has been right more often than wrong. In the absence of data on public opinion, prejudice will fill the void. The Guardian has decided to take a pause on reporting polls as political news, but will not rush to discontinue the monthly series of surveys which it has commissioned over the last 30 years. Instead, this series will be maintained in a low-key way: while lessons are learned, methodologies are refined and – we hope – trust is restored. The review launched by the British Polling Council is crucial in all this. It is imperative that it does not become an inside industry job. It is encouraging that Professor Patrick Sturgis, a research methods expert, will be in the chair. He will need help from the pollsters, but most of his panel should be independent academics. He should also include at least some voices from the media, which fund and interpret the polls. There are technical questions about late swings, and about how on earth you recruit a representative sample in a world of self-selecting internet panels and rising irritation with marketing telephone calls. The answers, however, are of more than technical importance. They affect the hope of building a better-informed democracy. |