What happens when you check the polling numbers in a Times column?

Welcome to this week’s edition which takes a look at Emma Duncan’s somewhat provocative attack on humanities degrees in The Times. In particular, does the piece’s use of polling data stand up?

But first, this week’s sigh of exasperation is directed at the BBC for confusing on Twitter a few high street vox pops with a proper measure of opinion in a constituency. (Given the national opinion captured in the polls listed in the ‘10 things’ section below, it’s very, very unlikely that the vox pops in the story are an accurate reflection of opinion in that area as opposed to an accurate reflection of who will stop to talk with a journalist on a main road in the middle of the working day.)

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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How does Emma Duncan’s use of polling stand up to scrutiny?

It is hardly a surprise that Emma Duncan’s piece for The Times saying, “We should cheer decline of humanities degrees” has attracted a lot of attention, not necessarily positive. Particularly as she’s a visiting fellow at an institution that embraces humanities degrees itself.

She complains that we have too many people with degrees, warning that it is causing a political crisis:

We are overproducing big time … [such] elite overproduction has uncomfortable political consequences.

She even adds that:

The Taiping Rebellion in China, the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Arab Spring — all these … were fed by a surplus of young people whose prospects did not match their expectations.

Dramatic stuff.

So what’s an owner of at least one and a half humanities degrees¹ writing a newsletter about polling to do?

As more than enough has already been tweeted about her article overall, let’s zoom in on one paragraph. It contains some polling evidence on which we can deploy those humanities degree honed skills of checking the sources, looking at other evidence and evaluating her argument:

Setting young people up with £70,000 of debt (tuition plus maintenance) and without a decent job is a surefire way of generating discontent. They think the system is rotten. Since 2005 the proportion of millennials with confidence in the government has fallen from two in five to one in five, half the level of the population as a whole. Three fifths of people under 35 — the highest proportion by far — think that it would be a good thing to have “a strong leader who does not bother with parliament or elections” running the country.

Let’s take those claims one by one.

First “£70,000 of debt”. Those words in the article itself link to another piece from The Times, but it isn’t a piece that substantiates these numbers. (To be fair, that link may have been added for SEO purposes rather than humanities-style-reference-your-sources purposes.)

However, the House of Commons Library does have figures: “The forecast average debt among the cohort of borrowers who started their course in 2021/22 is £45,800 when they complete their course. Forecast debt is expected to be lower for those starting in the reformed system from 2023/24 at £43,400.” Or there’s The Times itself: “The average student debt is £45,000 plus interest.”

Not a promising start though also not my area of expertise. So let’s move on to the polling numbers which feature in her second claim in that extract: “Since 2005 the proportion of millennials with confidence in the government has fallen from two in five to one in five.”

This looks to be from one of the questions in The World Values Survey, a reputable survey.² Indeed, I’ve quoted from it myself in previous editions of this newsletter.

But before we even check into the details, that reference to 2005 should raise our suspicions, because in 2005 the then government won a third consecutive general election victory. So you might naturally expect confidence in a government to be higher when its relatively popular and winning re-election than in The Year of The Three Prime Ministers.

More specifically, the latest fieldwork for the World Values survey in this country was 1 March - 9 September 2022. That cuts off before the Truss meltdown, but even so is from a period when the governing party averaged 7 points behind in the polls while during 2005 the then governing party averaged 6 points ahead in the polls.³

So talking about a decline between 2005 and now and associating that decline with a claimed elite over-production is ignoring other plausible explanations for the change, including the most obvious one - the less popular a government is, the less confidence people have in it.

What’s more, if we go all humanities student and dig out the original sources, we find a handy time series from different waves of the survey. That shows the big decline being from 2005 to 2009. It seems a fair inference that what’s going on here is more to do with the 2007-8 financial crisis than with the number of people with humanities degrees.

It’s true that the time series also shows that millennials have gone from having above average confidence in the government to below average confidence. But then again the politics of the government has changed. We had one that drew significant support from younger people then and we now have one that is massively dependent on older people. This is a point that the survey team themselves highlighted: “this is to some extent likely to be a reflection of normal party preferences among younger people, given the change from a Labour to Conservative government in 2010.”

All added up - a less popular government, the financial crash and a switch in government political appeal to older people - this is a trio of explanations that are certainly plausible enough to conclude that it’s not good enough to just assert by implication, as the article does, that the story is instead one of too many people with humanities degrees.

Third, “Three fifths of people under 35 — the highest proportion by far — think that it would be a good thing to have ‘a strong leader who does not bother with parliament or elections’ running the country.”

But again, let’s go all humanities student and check our original sources. This data is from the same survey, and here’s what it found:

24% of Britons approve of having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections, with views virtually unchanged from 24 years ago (25%).

That doesn’t sound like too many humanities degrees leading to a growth in those who want a strong leader.

It’s true that, as other surveys also show, there is a perhaps uncomfortably large number of people who like the idea of strong leaders instead of democracy when presented with a (semi-hypothetical) polling question. Just under a third of people, for example, picked “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with the parliament and elections” as a good way for our country to deal with crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

But that’s not the same as saying the number is growing worryingly and that the growth is caused by university course choices. Especially as the World Values Survey also shows that the proportion of people thinking that a democratic system is a good one to have in this country has been steadily rising from the start of this century. Oh, and, “millennials were once much less positive about democracy, but have since come into line with older generations”.

And wait… for the World Values Survey handily has data from multiple countries around the world, which means it can conclude that,

The UK is among the least likely to think having a strong leader who disregards parliament and elections is a good way to govern.

The individual country figures from around the world are all over the place, but with two common features. One, I can’t see a pattern of growth in humanities students pushing up the figures. I’ve not done a rigorous analysis on that, but then it wasn’t me who made the inference that there is one by writing an article and it’s fair to say the onus is on the writer to have evidence that stacks up. Two, the presence of a minority who say in answer to such as question that they like the idea of an undemocratic strong leaders is a permanent feature of established democracies and so, rather like turnout in elections almost never reaching close to 100%, while it’s certainly not ideal, it’s not a worrying sign of democracy being under serious threat either.

All in all, I don’t think that paragraph from The Times would have done well if submitted as part of a university essay. It is, as the Five Thirty Eight podcast is wont to say, a bad use of polling and, ironically given Emma Duncan’s previous column on the need to be optimistic rather than pessimistic, more pessimistic about democracy than the evidenced cited justifies.

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National voting intention polls

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, see PollBase.

Last week’s edition

Surprises in the detail of the Best for Britain/Focaldata MRP.

Know other people interested in political polling?

Politicians over-estimate how right-wing voters are, and other polling news