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Welcome to the 174th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which goes full tilt against the common refrain that politicians pay too much attention to the opinion polls. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that they do not pay enough attention to polls.¹
Next comes a summary of the latest national voting intention polls, seat numbers from the latest MRPs and a round-up of party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read 10 insights from the latest polling and analysis. These include:
What do people think are the potential positives of Kemi Badenoch becoming PM?
Which party’s supporters are least in favour of their children or grandchildren attending university?
When does political messaging that does well in polling tests fail in the real world?
If you are not yet a paying subscriber, you can read all the answers by starting a free trial now:
And with that, on with the show.
Want to know more about political polling? Get my book - Polling UnPacked: the history, uses and abuses of political opinion polling.
How politicians get public opinion wrong
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I have written before about the benefits that come from widespread availability of high-quality political polling. We need more polls and more good coverage of polls.
However, what I’ve not dug into before is the research into how accurately politicians estimate public opinion on issues.
Thankfully we have academic research to tell us.
First, the bad news:
We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries.² Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels of public support, we conclude that politicians are quite inaccurate estimators of people’s preferences. They make large errors and even regularly misperceive what a majority of the voters wants. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public preferences than ordinary citizens.
Walgrave, S., Jansen, A., Sevenans, J., Soontjens, K., Pilet, J.B., Brack, N., Varone, F., Helfer, L., Vliegenthart, R., van der Meer, T., Breunig, C., Bailer, S., Sheffer, L. & Loewen, P.J. (2023a), “Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries”, The Journal of Politics, 85(1): 209-222.
The bad news is not quite as bad as that makes it sound because, when asked whether the majority of public opinion was for or against various policies, politicians picked the wrong option ‘only’ 29% of the time. However, this included getting it wrong even when public opinion is far from evenly split on an issue:
They do not only get it wrong when the public is divided and hard to read (e.g., when there is a 51%:49% distribution). Seventy percent of the misplacements occur for policies with a relatively clear distribution of at least 60% (dis)agreeing citizens.
Moreover, the public scored only slightly worse than politicians, picking the wrong option 2.7 out of 8 times on average, compared with 2.3 times for politicians.
Turning to the other measure of accuracy (not which side is in the lead but what the percentage support is for each side) politicians on average were 18 percentage points out in their guesses. Again, this was only slightly better than the public, whose error came in at 21 percentage points.³
Further research, using the same mix of countries, gives a little more comfort about how (in)accurate perceptions are:
We show that politicians have a better understanding of public opinion when they think the issue matters to voters. Further, when an issue is personally important to politicians they more accurately estimate their party supporters’ opinions. The results confirm that politicians hold more accurate perceptions of voters’ preferences when they think it is important to do so but not necessarily when the issues actually are important to voters.
Butler, C., Walgrave, S., Soontjens, K. & Loewen, P.J. (2024), “Politicians are better at estimating public opinion when they think it is more salient”, Party Politics: 1–13.
Even so, it’s not a good picture.
The remedy for this?
Politicians should spend more time reading the polls.
So forward this newsletter to one you know…
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national voting intention figures from each of the pollsters currently active.
Possibly of note are the two polls showing a sharp rise in the Conservative rating. That is not reflected in data from other pollsters, and it is not obvious what would have caused it. Hence it is likely that this is noise rather than a real trend, and indeed the two pollsters themselves have not talked up a ‘Conservative surge’ based on their latest figures. But we will see as more data comes in.
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Next, the latest seat projections from MRP models and similar, also sorted by fieldwork dates. As these are infrequent, note how old some of the ‘latest’ data is. Note also how close the Conservative Party is to falling to fourth or even, with some models, fifth (!) on seats.
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Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster.
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For more details, and updates during the week as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up: the previous two editions
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Voters give a surprising answer over what they want from a PM, and other polling news
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
“This surprised me a bit”: Steve Akehurst on new polling that shows voters...
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