Author Archives: Mark Pack

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

The 1992 polling debacle

The 1992 general election was a bad one for the British political polling industry. During the campaign, the vast majority of polls put Labour ahead and of the final round of polls three put Labour ahead, one put Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck and only one – Gallup – gave the Conservatives a lead, but even that was a mere 0.5%. The actual result? A Conservative lead of 7.6%.

A declining number of opinion polls

The response of the polling industry was a series of post-mortems and experiments with changes in methodology. Amongst those who commissioned polls, though, the response was also one of greater scepticism of the value of commissioning polls. Add in first the economic pressures of the 1990s and then the widespread seemingly inevitability of a Labour general election victory after Tony Blair become Labour leader, and it is no surprise that during the 1992-97 Parliament the number of opinion polls was consistently lower than in 1987-1992.

Individual periods of political excitement and then the approach of the general election did result in burst of extra polls, but consistently the number of polls conducted ran at a lower level than in the previous Parliament.

In the next two Parliaments – 1997-2001 and 2001-5 – there was very little sign of the number of opinion polls recovering. Perhaps no surprise again as in the polls that were conducted Labour held a large lead, with only the occasional brief periods of exception. With one party consistently largely ahead, the interest in individual poll results was understandably muted except at those moments such as the petrol price crisis of autumn 2000, when the Conservatives very briefly went into the lead in the polls.

Number of opinion polls recovers

Politics since 2005 has, however, been far from consistent and predictable and, indeed, the number of polls commissioned has picked up once again, as can be seen from the graph*. Across 2008, the number of polls was only 10 less than in 1990.

Although only two firms were doing political polling in both 1990 and 2008 (ICM and MORI), the overall number of firms has changed little. Five firms polling in 1990 were no longer political polling by 2008 (ASL, Gallup, Harris, NMR and NOP), but this is nearly balanced out by the four firms which were not polling in 1990 but were doing so in 2008 (BPIX, ComRes, Populus and YouGov).

Is the increasing number of political opinion polls a good thing?