Andrew Rawnsley has joined the crowd round the cadaver at the pollsters’ post mortem for the May 2015 General Election:
“Now if only I had followed my own advice about opinion polls…”
At 10pm on 7 May last year, Martin Boon, the head of the polling company ICM, spoke for his entire industry in a two word tweet: “Oh, shit.”
There follows some discussion of what went wrong, and then it gets to the part that really interests me:
It might even be paradoxically true that by forecasting a hung parliament, the polls helped to produce a Tory majority government. I think there is something in this, but the trouble with the hypothesis is that it is just a hypothesis. Since we can’t rerun the election with accurate polling, it can’t be proved.
That hasn’t stopped some voices from responding to the polling failure by demanding a ban on their publication in the days before an election. That is a rotten idea. It would be anti-democratic, unfair and it wouldn’t work anyway. In a free society, it should not be illegal to collect opinions and publish the results. Another objection to a ban is that it would be partial. A privileged minority, commercial interests and the political parties themselves would still conduct and have access to private polls. In any case, a ban looks highly impractical because it could not prevent websites abroad from publishing polls.
He writes good sense, but it does not stop many, many of the commenters to Mr Rawnsley’s article demanding that polls be banned in the run-up to an election. Many of these want polls banned simply because they think it would help the Labour party. Amusingly, a lot of the same commenters who now say that the pollsters conspired to exaggerate the chance of a Labour victory in order to frighten Conservative voters off their sofas were saying before the election that the pollsters were conspiring to exaggerate the chance of a Conservative victory in order to demoralize Labour supporters. And now they refuse to believe the recent polls that say Jeremy Corbyn is widely considered unfit to be prime minister.
The group above overlaps with those who want to ban opinion polls because fantasizing about banning things is one of their few pleasures in life, but there are also some calls for polls to be banned from people who do not give the impression of being quite such control freaks.
These less visibly freakish commenters often want a ban on polls specifically because – get this – voters might change their intentions if they know more about what other voters are likely to do. If you think about it, this is a very weird argument. For one thing, under this argument the case for a ban (such as it is) becomes stronger the more consistently accurate polling becomes. For another, the people making it generally rail against the voters for not bothering to inform themselves, but in this matter they demand that the voters be forbidden to inform themselves. Why that particular exception? Why should voters be encouraged to consider the effect their vote will have by looking at the party manifestos, or by using the results of the previous election to decide how best to place their vote tactically, but be forbidden to consider what their fellow voters are planning to do? If the protest vote I am considering making against Party X turns out to be rather more likely to propel the dreadful Candidate Y into the seat than I had previously thought, I want to know about it.
But I remember reading that the Conners knew they were ahead weeks before the actual election, from their own private polling. So a ban on the day wouldn’t do much for anyone.
This instinct to ban runs deep in many people. I’ve just been reading an laughable blog from some academics who, in effect, want to ban reporting on research that is funded by privately i.e. all research they disagree with. In this case it was alcohol, but the same goes for the whole gamut of policy from climate change to sugar. Of course, they didn’t manage a single word on why the research in question was wrong, that would have diverted energy from attacking the authors.
Markets are dependent on the free flow of information. If your against markets, then the easy target is that flow of information.
Banning polling would result would achieve nothing, and that would soon become apparent to those of a censorious disposition. And so the next call would be to ban any public speculation of what one’s fellow voters *might* be thinking, and so we lose the pundits. Not that I’d mourn them as a professional group in the least, but we’d soon be in a position where any attempt to communicate your voting intention with your fellow human beings would be banned. All for your own good, you understand.
This is the thin end of a very nasty, splitery wedge.
It is just displacement activity for banning people from not voting Labour, which is the fundamental drive imho.
Why would the Tories’ private polls be any more accurate than the non-Tory public ones? Or Labour’s private polls, for that matter?
Patrick,
Stop it! Now! You are ruining the mystique of psephology. Many media pundits and political hacks jobs’ depend on this sort of thing. Are you trying to take bread from peoples’ mouths?
Canada has had some similar rules in past – you cannot release a poll result on election day(though you can in the days leading up to it), and because of how many time zones we cover, there was also until recently a rule forbidding publication of election results in any part of the country where voting is still open. (The latter one collapsed due to things like Twitter – the 2011 election had so many hundreds of thousands of accidental violations that they just took it off the books rather than enforce it). They’re not terrible, but they are kind of useless.
Taken to its logical conclusion, voters should be banned from talking to one another about politics or voting intentions in the days prior to the GE.
John B, why stop at politics?
People could be banned from talking to each other at all about anything except in the presence of a state official.
Schools, the NHS, which car or beer to buy, which person to hire or marry – we can’t have people influencing the opinion of others without careful monitoring from the state.
That’s daft. Why didn’t they just stagger the counts so they occur simultaneously e.g. run them at say 10:00 UTC the following day. There’s only 5 and 1/2 hours difference across all the Canadian time zones, so it would be 05:00 in Toronto and 02:00 in British Columbia. The results could be published before the papers go to press in each locality and the election result would be generally available by the time most folks wake up.
If an election result is known by the time you’re able to vote you might not bother to vote if you had been intending to vote for a smaller party. This further disadvantages smaller parties by making them seem less supported than they might really be. Or indeed the local MP who is part of the party that has won nationally might perversely lose his seat because party supporters no longer feel the need to go out and vote. I think it is quite a different issue to the poll issue.
The left are demented – and evil.
And they always want to ban things.
No doubt the argument will be that opinion polls are an “other regarding activity” (Mr J.S. Mill’s great gift to statism – one no longer had to prove that something was an aggression, as long as it was an “other regarding” activity) as opinion polls “effect behaviour” and this means they “harm” people (the Labour Party) without being a Common Law aggression (violation) against them.
Best to tell these leftists to jump in the nearest lake.
In the US…
We have “scientific polls”, and we have The Las Vegas Betting Line odds (on just about ANY “contest”)
Anyone care to apply for a Gub’mint “academic study” grant to determine which one consistently predicts
the outcome of ANY contest?
Discussion here, around 10.45
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vn925
Seems Conservatives are harder to find at home.
Not really much of a surprise, too busy out working to pay their larger share of the taxes!
The government have limited jurisdiction in an internet age, assuming polls do influence voting, then banning polls in the UK (which is all they could do) merely opens it up to foreign influence.
AFAIK, the US still has a ban on the TV networks’ releasing their predictions on the results of any given state in the presidential elections until after all of the polls have closed in that state. This only affects states which span more than one time zone (notably Florida, where some of the western panhandle is in the Central time zone).
Well a report is out and the BBC said that the pollsters over-sampled Labour voters.
Well that was evident as soon as the votes were declared. The question should be how this happens? Might it be:
1. The violent tendencies of socialists tends to put people off announcing that they are not socialists, so Conservatives under-declare?
2. Conservative voters are mischievous, or liars?
3. The pollsters don’t know what they are doing?
4. Many people realised that with Ed Miliband in 10 Downing Street, they might be ruled by a mate of Russell Brand, and they became politically active to stop that?
5. The pollsters are Lefty political wonks who have an inherent bias towards Labour and making Labour look good?
6. Labour supporters are lazier than others, and tend not to vote?
7. How on Earth can we know when we are all individuals and capable of making up and changing our own minds, and there is no guarantee that anyone responds accurately to a polling question?