By
Mark Pack
|
Published
8th February 2010 - 11:18 pm
I wasn’t expecting that.
The Times has reported its latest opinion poll. It has reported the changes in party share of the vote.
And then Peter Riddell has said,
These shifts are within the margin of error
Why’s that impressive? Because nearly every opinion poll only shows changes within the margin of error (you’ve usually got to look over a wider pattern to see statistically significant changes), but that doesn’t stop newspapers writing up their stories as if the changes in support are significant and therefore ones we can be sure actually happened.
It’s as if the newspapers think, “Look, we know the poll doesn’t …
Yesterday, Pollwatch looked at the state of the parties in January; today it’s the turn of the party leaders. As with all polls, what follows comes with caveats. Only three polling companies – YouGov, Mori and Angus RS – regularly ask questions specifically to find out the public’s views of the three main party leaders. And each asks variants on the basic question – do you think Clegg/Brown/Cameron are doing a good job – to come up with their figures, so comparison ain’t easy. But, still, we don’t indulge in polls often, so here goes …
Here, in chronological order, are …
A total of 13 polls were published during January. Now, as our readers know, LDV doesn’t cover them with the same breathless excitements as other parts of the media. Most poll movements are within the margin of error, so it is only looked at over a period of time that you can detect whether there has really been any significant movements between the parties. With those caveats in place, let’s succomb to the inevitable and start poll-obsessing …
Here are January’s polls in chronological order:
By
Mark Pack
|
Published
5th February 2010 - 9:50 am
As I blogged last month, The Voice is going to start rating the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, which is often far from perfect:
There is progress, helped no doubt by the criticism from Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson, both of whom are respected by many of the relevant journalists.
However, there is still much more that could be done to raise the overall quality of such reporting, so here at The Voice we’re going to start scoring each poll commissioned by a traditional media outlet and the way in which its initial report is worded.
Once the scores
…
Forget data sets, interquartile ranges and margin of error. The Guardian recently reported the collective wisdom of the wet-fingers-in-the-air of the UK’s pollsters, who met this past week “to refine their methods ahead of the election, and ended with off-the-cuff predictions for the final result.”
And here’s what they came up with:
Statisticians from most of Britain’s main polling companies attended the session, organised jointly by the British Polling Council and the National Centre for Research Methods.
Four of them were brave enough to come up with predicted vote shares for the main parties. Put together they average a shade under 40%
…
Now LDV doesn’t, as our readers know, usually focus on individual opinion polls – but this one’s a little out of the ordinary, as it focuses on the voting intentions of teachers. The survey of nearly 4,000 teachers for the education charity the Sutton Trust by Ipsos MORI revealed the following voting intentions:
- Labour 25%
- Tories 18%
- Lib Dems 14%
Here’s what the Independent had to say about the poll in relation to the Lib Dems:
Today’s poll showed the Liberal Democrats lagging behind the two main parties with just 14 per cent. Traditionally, third parties have done well in polls
…
By
Mark Pack
|
Published
14th January 2010 - 11:50 am
Just over a year ago, I highlighted how YouGov consistently found the Conservatives relatively more popular amongst women than men compared to other pollsters:
YouGov, MORI and ComRes are the three of the main polling companies who also provide a gender breakdown of party levels of support using the same methodology as for their headline voting question…
Whilst YouGov consistently finds the Conservative party more popular amongst women than men, the other two consistently find the opposite. There is a similar difference amongst the pollsters when it comes to Labour support, though this time the gender pattern is reversed.
With more polling …
By
Mark Pack
|
Published
12th January 2010 - 4:20 pm
The number of published opinion polls into British general election voting intention hit a twenty plus year high in 2009 with 141 polls carried out during the calendar year.
That is the highest figure since at least 1987 (when my records commence)* and more that completes the polling industry’s recovery from its post-1992 nadir. You can see the quarterly trend in this graph:
By
Mark Pack
|
Published
11th January 2010 - 12:20 pm
The quality of traditional media coverage of political opinion polling has been a common cause of complaints amongst political bloggers. The most obvious problem is when an opinion poll from one polling company is compared not with the previous poll from that company but against an older one because the intervening one happened to have been published by a different media outlet.
Whilst comparing, say, the latest ICM poll with the previous ICM poll is the most useful comparison to make, if that previous ICM poll appeared elsewhere, in the part it has got airbrushed out of report of the latest …
By
Mark Pack
|
Published
8th January 2010 - 10:20 am
Presenting a new analysis of the merits of the two main ways of converting party vote shares in to seat number projections:
Although uniform national swing (UNS) calculations are widely used to extrapolate likely seat numbers from party’s national ratings and have the merit of simplicity, they are not without their critics. For example, in November ConservativeHome ran a piece from Quentin Langley which said,
That it [UNS] continues to be used when a superior system was developed more than three decades ago is a testament to incompetence in the media…
The Proportional Loss Hypothesis (PLH) developed by Dr Gordon Reece of
…
The last month of the year: a time for taking stock, and anticpating the challenges of the 12 months to come. So what could be more fitting than for LDV – no slavish followers of the polls, we – to reflect on 2009’s polls? Let’s start, though, with the latest polling data. Here, in chronological order, are the results of the nine polls published in December:
Tories 40, Labour 29, Lib Dems 19 (6 Dec, ICM)
Tories 40, Labour 27, Lib Dems 18 (6 Dec, YouGov)
Also posted in Op-eds
|
Tagged featured
|
Today’s Times publishes a study by Professor Colin Rallings and Professor Michael Thrasher of Plymouth University based on actual votes cast in the dozens of by-elections that take place for council seats each month. Here are the headline findings:
It shows that although David Cameron’s Conservatives have a 10-point lead over Labour as the year draws to a close, the gap has been narrowing since the summer. The by-election model, which has been reworked to take account of different patterns of competition between the parties, has the Tories on 38%, with both Labour and the Liberal Democrats on 28%.
The calculations
…
There’s been a fair degree of criticism of the Lib Dems’ parliamentary by-election performances in the last couple of years: the 2006 ‘glory days’ of beating Labour in Dunfermline, and coming oh-so-close against the Tories in Bromley have seemed an increasingly distant memory. So, let’s celebrate an arena where the party is doing well: local government by-elections. And not merely doing well: in fact, doing better than the other two major parties.
(Hat-tips to John’s Liberal Revolution blog and to middle englander on the Vote 2007 website).
Here are the summary results of the 280 by-elections held during 2009:
Tom Smithard, the Lib Dems’ Parliamentary Campaigns & Intelligence Analyst, has been compiling an occasional polling report – collating interesting material from published polls and providing a bit of commentary – for internal use within Cowley Street since he started working for the party this summer. We’re publishing his latest assessment in two parts: yesterday focused on the Lib Dems’ poll ratings; today, the second anniversary of Nick Clegg’s election as Lib Dem leader, Tom looks at Nick’s personal ratings as leader.
Firstly, some very good news: for the first time Nick Clegg has scored higher than David Cameron on …
Tom Smithard, the Lib Dems’ Parliamentary Campaigns & Intelligence Analyst, has been compiling an occasional polling report – collating interesting material from published polls and providing a bit of commentary – for internal use within Cowley Street since he started working for the party this summer. We’re publishing his latest assessment in two parts: today focuses on the Lib Dems’ poll ratings; tomorrow, the second anniversary of Nick Clegg’s election as Lib Dem leader, Tom looks at Nick’s personal ratings as leader.
December has seen a pleasing turnaround in our share of the vote with ComRes. On November 11 we …
After two months of poll fluctuations triggered by the ups-and-downs of party conference-dominated media coverage, November gives us an opportunity to look at the parties’ popularity, as measured by the polls, for the first time since early September.
Here, in chronological order, are the results of the 10 polls published in November:
Tories 41.0, Labour 27.0, Lib Dems 17.0 (6 Nov, YouGov)
Tories 38.0, Labour 24.0, Lib Dems 20.0 (6 Nov, Angus RS)
By
Mark Pack
|
Published
1st December 2009 - 9:40 am
According to a poll carried out last month by MORI, the majority of people believe that men are paid more than women for doing equal work.
The poll found that 52% of people disagree with the statement that men and women receive the same pay for doing jobs of equal value. Overall 40% think that men and woman are paid equally. There is however a big gender gap – 48% of men think men and women are paid equally but only 32% of women.
The poll also found that 85% of people agree with introducing “a legal requirement for employers to conduct annual pay …
The latest Ipsos MORI poll for the Observer has Labour support jumping by 5% at the expense of the Conservatives and narrowing the gap between the two biggest parties to just 6%.
The poll has the Conservatives on 37%, Labour on 31% and the Lib Dems on 17%. That’s well into hung parliament territory and really quite surprising just six months out from a General Election.
As the graph on page three of this “getting opinion polls right” pdf shows, the Labour lead over John Major’s government from August 1996 to Februrary 1997 was consistently between 12 and 25% across …
We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV – of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.
Here, in chronological order, are the results of the 19 polls published in October – the number is extra high again this month because of the daily YouGov tracker polls which ran during party conference season. (And many apologies for the delayed appearance of the round-up; it was my LDV colleague Iain’s post today which reminded me this needed publishing).
Tories 41.0, Labour 29.0, Lib Dems 17.0 (2 Oct, YouGov)
Tories 40.0, Labour 27.0, Lib Dems 20.0 (5 Oct, YouGov)
PoliticsHome (yes, I’m still reading it, despite everything) published an interesting poll today, taking the temperature of public opinion on MPs’ expenses, post-Legg:
… [the poll] suggests that more than half the population believes the recommendations were ‘not tough enough’, 57% have ‘no sympathy whatsoever’ and 60% are as interested in the story as they ever were. The LIberal Democrat MPs are perceived to have behaved the best.
The survey is split down into categories of voter identification – Lib Dem, Labour, Tory, none – and generally there is little marked difference in the attitudes of party supporters:
