Gen Z, democracy and a problem with the speech from Channel 4's Chief Exec
Welcome to the 146th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which cannot quite tear itself away from looking at how The Times reports polls, but this time at least it is a report from that paper about a poll commissioned and released by Channel 4.
Then it is a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings, followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis.
This week, those ten include how few people think Brexit has been good for anything.
But first, another follow-up to my piece about improving the (self-)regulation of political polling. In that I wrote:
There has been a new pattern in recent years of pollsters slipping out polling data via graphs which contain older data points that never had data tables published at the time. It has become a fun side-hobby to look at a pollster’s new graph to spot the new old polls. Again, every time I have contacted a pollster about a graph ‘revealing’ an old data point without public data tables, the data tables have then been made public.
And lo, More in Common produced a new graph on Wednesday which slipped out two older Nigel Farage net ratings scores that had not previously been released and for which the data tables were not findable on their site when I looked.
(More in Common are unlucky that I spotted them doing this soon after I had written about it. Another time it would have been a different pollster and they have always been good at responding to my data table queries. So if you’re reading this Luke, it’s the September 24-25 and the November 8-11 Nigel Farage ratings which look to be missing.)
Despite these sorts of hiccups, it is worth remembering just how much better political polling in the UK is that it is in the US, as an old post of mine from 2010 reminded me this week.
Finally before we get down to the new stuff, Carl Cullinane shared on social media data from the Sutton Trust that throws doubt on the level of dishonesty from parents claimed in that story I dug into last week.
Want to know more about political polling? Get my book Polling UnPacked: the history, uses and abuses of political opinion polling.
Is Channel 4 Chief Exec right about Gen Z and democracy?
Another week, another headline from The Times to dig into. This time around it is “Gen Z doubts about democracy laid bare in ‘worrying’ survey” followed by “More than half believe the UK should be a dictatorship”.
So far, so respectable sounding. Especially as you can add “multi award winning” before “Channel 4” and as the data was going to be launched at an event co-hosted by the prestigious Royal Television Society.
But… yes, of course there are some buts.1
The story was an exclusive given to The Times a couple of days ahead of the report’s publication. Placing such a story is perfectly normal publicity work and running such a story is perfect normal journalism.
But, what it also means is that once again the story about a poll got to travel far and wide before any real details about the poll got published with the full report. From the newspaper story appearing on Sunday evening through to Channel 4 publishing things on Thursday all we had was the newspaper report without any poll details. Even now, not many details have been made public.2
The pollster, Craft, are not a member of the British Polling Council so no transparency rules were broken. Yet it is also pretty unsatisfactory that a poll got such coverage with so little transparency at the time and significant gaps in the transparency remaining even later. As it was Channel 4’s publicity team that will have controlled all that, I would not blame Craft. Rather, this is also another example of a problem with a poll being down to the media rather than the pollster.
More positively for the media, The Times’s headline fairly reflects Channel 4’s Chief Executive Alex Mahon’s speech on Thursday. She said:
There is clear evidence of democratic disengagement and an increasing shift towards authoritarianism already. Among those aged 13-27 in the UK, we found, shockingly, that 52% say they think the UK would be better with a strong leader, unfettered by Parliament and elections. This compares to 40% of those aged 45-65.
Here is where things start getting a bit odd, however, as that point of the speech was footnoted with four references, the Craft poll and three others. Note in particular the phrase “an increasing shift” as we dive into those.3
One of those, from Ipsos for King’s College, shows rising support for democracy from Millennials and while there is not a trend line for Gen Z, it comes in as more supportive of democracy than Millennials did when they first came in.4 It’s the same again - rising figures for Millennials and Gen Z coming in at higher than where Millennials started - for how important people say it is to live in a democracy.5 Even the questions about army rule and strong leaders show no clear upward trend. Although the poll does show army rule is most popular with young people, the trend is down and again Gen Z is no keener on the military than Millennials used to be.6
A second source is the Open Society Foundation but its barometer has only had the one outing, so we have no trends over time for that. Although it does find support for flavours of authoritarian rule higher among younger people, as that Ipsos data showed, that does not mean it is rising or even that it is higher than previous generations when they were of the same age.
The third source is JL Partners for UK Onward. Again, it features a one-off poll without a time series that shows younger people giving higher answers for the anti-democratic answers. But again that does not tell us that such views are on the up. It does though also pull data from another source that shows such views highest among young people and on the rise.7
Then finally we have that Craft poll, which again is a one-off without a time series. It is supplemented in the report by other data sources, true, but the time series data mentioned in the methodology is the Ipsos data already mentioned.8
Hunting through the footnotes in the Craft report,9 I found one other data source slipped in alongside three of those from the speech, the authoritative British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey of 2023. However, it runs counter to the Chief Exec’s speech: “Both groups have become more liberal over time [and] younger people have always been less authoritarian than older people.”
To be fair to Craft, the text in its report referencing this footnote does not make a similar claim to that in the speech.10 Though the Craft report then goes on to cite its own data which broadly contradicts the BSA (i.e. gives a different overall impression though does use different exact question wording by the looks of it), without providing any reason for why we should value the Craft data ahead of the BSA.
So what does that give us to backup the claim that there is “ clear evidence” of “an increasing shift towards authoritarianism”? One data sources that says yes, one that says no, one data source that says nothing and one that says both yes and no.
I think it is fair to say whoever pulled together that part of the speech for Channel 4’s Chief Executive did not do her any favours.
No surprise then that various polling and research experts were sceptical in their own reactions to the coverage of the report.
Chris Prosser of the British Election Study (BES) pointed out that the Channel 4 / Craft data:
Contradicts other data, such as our own British Election Study Internet panel, which shows considerably stronger support for democracy amongst Gen Z.
Not only is the % of Gen Z supporting dictators much lower than reported by the Times (13% in 2024 vs 52%). Gen Z are the *least* likely generation to support a strong leader.
A similar point about the high quality BES data painting a different picture was made by Owen Winter.
Given the high quality and easy availability of the BES data it is not clear why it did not make it into the Channel 4 or Craft footnotes, particularly when it provides a time series and several of the sources cited do not.
One other source left out, though for good reasons, is data from the Deltapoll for the Tony Blair Institute. It is only just out and so to new to have been included. More on the overall findings from this research below, but for this story what is relevant is that this new poll finds that younger voters in the UK are less likely to hold 'anti-system' attitudes than older voters.
Bobby Duffy, of King’s College London - as in that first footnoted data source, was also sceptical of the Channel 4 / Craft / The Times claims, and warned of the danger that wrong figures pose:
52% of Gen Z agreeing we need "strong leaders not bothering with elections" would be a huge jump, as Chris says. Here's World Values Survey trend, where 27% agree, half the level.
Do worry about rhetoric around this - does set tone that Gen Z are a big break, which can gain own momentum.
A non-trivial concern given how widely the - quite possibly wrong - story was reported in follow up stories elsewhere in the media as if it was right.11
The primary problem therefore rests with how Channel 4 chose to present the research it has commissioned. The Times, given an exclusive on the story, did not apparently cross check the claimed research findings against other publicly available research. No references to any of that contradictory data made it into their story at least.
To be fair to the newspaper, one of the basic trade-offs in journalism is to be nice to the folk who give you an exclusive because otherwise you won’t get given exclusives by others in future. Such trade-offs are not the glorious independent journalism holding the powerful to account that the media loves talking up if regulation is in the air. But it is a hard nosed bit of pragmatic self-survival which is understandable. Rubbish an exclusive story that someone gives you and your supply of future stories will dry up.
What does this leave us with when we do the things that neither Craft, Channel 4 nor The Times did, i.e. take a look at all the relevant data?
There are certainly things to be concerned about, and plenty of worthwhile - even important - debates to be had about some of the findings from the Craft research. There is definitely much of interest in the Craft report, including some surprisingly counter-intuitive data points (such as trust in the BBC being higher with younger people).12
But in an important respect, the basic Craft message is contradicted by other high quality data. Which is all the more reason why the coverage really should have zoomed in on this: because either Craft is wrong or other data that we trust is wrong and there is a big story that would come from that.
You have to ask that question before you go on to talking about the results that came out of Craft’s work. Otherwise you are taking a blind gamble on whether your press release, speech or newspaper story is right.
And so once again, a story about possible polling problems puts front and centre questions about how journalism works.
UPDATE: I returned to this topic the following week, having asked Channel 4 to release their poll data.
For an interesting take on the Channel 4 / Craft data that is at a tangent to all the above, see Melissa Butcher’s piece which treats the data as accurate but mixes in other data to come to a much more nuanced conclusion: “These are trends to be worried about. But gen Z are not somehow inherently anti-democratic.”
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates.
I have commented before that FindOutNow tends to have higher scores for Reform, but the pollster has pointed out that perhaps the question to ask is why they have a lower score for Labour (and that may be due to their turnout filter).
So I have checked the averages so far this year. Comparing the average of FindOutNow to the average of all the other pollsters, they have Reform 2.2 points higher on average and Labour 2.8 points lower. They are close to average for both Conservative (1.2 points difference) and the Lib Dems (0.8 points difference).
Next, a summary of the the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster:
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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Immigrants are more popular than immigration, and other polling news
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