More on voting and the perils of psephology

David talked of the validity of polling yesterday. Some historical context might be useful here. In the 1992 Election there was a general consensus that Labour should win, borne out by the majority of polling. The Election results demonstrated that the polls had been wrong, with the Tories winning relatively decisively. So what went wrong with the polls?

Well some of the psephologists explained that if a voter gave a ‘don’t know’ these stats were divided between the parties. But with hindsight they reckoned that given that the Tories were promising tax cuts and Labour more spending on public services , particularly the NHS ,  a fairly sizeable number of don’t knows were going to vote Tory but were ashamed of it., so they said they didn’t know. This of course raises ‘validity issues’ .
    Its considerably more common nowadays for the Political Parties to run ‘focus groups’. The idea of these is to get a carefully selected group of voters , show them something . perhaps a video clip of a Party leader and ask for their views. The theory is that the question agenda is not fixed in the same way , and they might say what they think , rather than what they think they ought to think! There can be problems with this though. I have it on good authority from a Labour activist involved in these groups that a floating voter who, when asked why she was less keen on voting Labour after seeing a video clip of Tony Blair , said ‘I just don’t like his hair’!

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