Polling on the death penalty, and what The Spectator left out

Welcome to this week’s edition which looks at polling about the death penalty as it’s back in the news following Lucy Letby’s conviction for a horrific set of murders.

Then it’s a look at the latest voting intention polls followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis. (If you’re a free subscriber, sign up for a free trial here to see what you’re missing.)

But first, this week’s letter of gentle disappointment gets sent to Politico’s London Playbook team for cherry-picking one voting intention poll to report when Politico itself runs a really good poll aggregator on its own site that uses them all.

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted some other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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What The Spectator reported, and what it left out

Here’s how The Spectator reported public views on the death penalty following the conviction of Lucy Letby:

A new poll for The Spectator by Redfield & Wilton show that 66 per cent of them favour the death penalty as just punishment. Polling of 1,500 people was conducted on Wednesday.

It’s a properly conducted poll by a respectable pollster, and with more details published on social media by the pollster (though at time of writing the data tables aren’t yet on their site that I could see).

There’s an obvious note of caution about any poll taken immediately after an event that may produce a very strong emotional reaction, of course. There’s also a little note of caution about how instinctive rather than deliberative people’s answers may have been given that the poll found higher support for the death penalty where the victim was “anyone” (49%) than if the victim was “a Member of Parliament” (47%).¹ Instinctive dislike of politicians runs deep…

But there’s also a much bigger note of caution, which comes from another poll, carried out by Deltapoll earlier this year and which explicitly offered an alternative to the death penalty.

While Redfield & Wilton mentioned whole life sentences in the preamble to its question, Deltapoll explicitly asked people to pick between whole life sentences, standard life sentences and the death penalty. With this choice offered, the poll found much lower support for the death penalty. For example, for the murder of MPs it was down to 19% saying that should normally be the punishment, with 27% picking a normal life sentence and 48% a whole life sentence.

The provision of three options with Deltapoll, along with asking what the sentence should “normally” be, means you can’t quite do a like-for-like comparison.

But the much lower Deltapoll figures are part of a wider picture that I covered back in February in The Week in Polls. The wider picture is how soft support for the death penalty is - perhaps surprisingly given the passion with which views are expressed.

But the more people are probed about the consequences and impact, or given details about alternative punishments, the lower support falls.

As I wrote back then:

A poll this week from Omnisis found 58% supporting the death penalty for some crimes. But in the same poll when asked if it is an effective deterrent, only 43% agreed and when asked if the death penalty has no place in a modern, civilized society, only 38% disagreed (though 31% also picked neither agree nor disagree). Having only minorities positively assent to it being a deterrent or having a place in a modern, civilized society suggests a lot of softness in that initial 58% finding.

One part of the bigger picture we know relatively little about, as even more comprehensive polling such as Deltapoll’s omits it. It’s how people might be influenced by the cost of imprisoning someone. It costs over £30,000 a year on average across all prisoners (and, though this isn’t my area of expertise, I’d expect a fair bit more for an imprisoned murderer). Would mentioning the cost change people’s views too? It’s quite possible that might move results in a less liberal direction - though worth noting that mentioning the cost of jail might also push the results in more liberal directions when asking about sentences for other crimes. Even more so if the cost of police officers is also mentioned, as the cost of having two people in jail is about equal to the cost of employing one police constable in London.

All of this means reporting just on a headline result about the death penalty in isolation is reporting which only gives a small part of the picture. The Spectator missed out a large part of the picture.

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National voting intention polls

This week’s polls continue the run of the Conservative vote share being in the doldrums. It was back in late June that we had the last poll putting the Conservatives on more than 30% (31% from Savanta, with fieldwork 23-25 June).

Here are the latest figures from each currently active pollster:

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here and for all the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

Last week’s edition

MRP: what it is and why it may, or may not, be right at the next general election.

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Who the public blames for NHS waiting lists and credits for falling inflation, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.