The public is often smarter than the headlines suggest

Welcome to the 108th edition of The Week in Polls, which stands up for the levels of political knowledge among members of the public.

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.)

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The public knows more than many people think

For anyone who seriously follows polling, it’s a very high likelihood that their top pet peeve over how polls are covered is the way a 1 point change in support gets written up as a “surge” if the change suits the media outlet’s editorial line. Me too.

My second pet peeve is the way polling results are often presented to belittle the public. “Look how shocking how few people know this basic fact!” type stuff.

Because often the public is much smarter than the headlines make it appear.

Answering polling questions isn’t a matter of slow, careful, considered judgement after a detailed briefing on a topic. Rather it’s a matter of giving quick answers to brief questions with the barest of information about the topic.

It’s why for some topics, the question wording can make such a big difference to the results. It’s also why giving a bit of a nudge can make the public seem much smarter, as a little clue can greatly increase the proportion of correct answers.

There’s plenty more of this in my book but there’s also a great example I’ve just rediscovered, a decade¹ on from its appearance.

It is courtesy of Phil Cowley² and some British Election Study³ data, published in 2014:

What percentage of people know the name of their MP? One recent survey by the Hansard society found the figure was down as low as 22%. That was the lowest figure in the ten years Hansard’s Audit of Political Engagement surveys had been asked. But even at its highest, the figure had only been 44%.

As someone who is absolutely hopeless at remembering names, I’ve always been a bit sceptical about the validity of the question.

As part of a paper I’m writing with Rosie Campbell, we’ve looked at the first wave of the current British Election Study, where a similar question is asked – but in a different way.  The BES asked their respondents: ‘which of the following people is the MP in your parliamentary constituency’?  They presented respondents with five fake names (‘Mary Davies’, ‘Susan Stewart’, etc) along with the correct MP for that respondent . All six names were presented in a randomised order. Plus, there was also a Don’t Know and an Other option.

Rather than producing a correct figure down in the 20s or even 40s, some 68% of respondents now got the answer right.

Of course, with multiple choice questions like this, there will be some guessing going on – but the relatively low numbers plumping for each of the wrong options suggests this was not a major problem…

A potentially more serious problem is that this question, like the rest of the survey, was asked online – and so people could have cheated, by looking up the correct option…

But still, even allowing for some guessing and some cheating, I suspect this shows that background knowledge of MPs is higher than the ‘standard’ question reveals. There are a sizeable chunk of people who do know the right answer, but are just rubbish at remembering names.

It also illustrates a wider problem, which is that it’s not in anyone’s interest to talk up how the public is actually pretty decent. Shock headlines about how few people know who their MPs are make for good news copy, even for less sensationalist outlets. They suit too those who - for the very best of reasons - want to get attention and resources given to civic education. They are what you want if you are a think tank wanting to get attention for your ideas. And anger or disdain at fellow humans is what the social media algorithms love too.

It all means that there is a mini-army of vested interests in talking up how little the public knows. That exacerbates the problem caused by the original question wording.

That point, of course, applies not only to people’s names but to many other pieces of political knowledge too.⁴

So the next time you see a poll finding about how little the public apparently knows, hold off any disdain: there’s a good chance the public are smarter than the finding suggests.

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National voting intention polls

A health warning about the PeoplePolling entry below: the data tables show the SNP on 0% overall and on 0% in all parts of the country except for 1% in Midlands/Wales. There’s something up, and we’ll have to wait and see if correcting that impacts the headline figures shown.

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.

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Last week’s edition

The good news for Labour in its local elections underperformance.

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Why you may well best not believe that poll about Nigel Farage, 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.