Everything is politics now, especially banking and technology. Business used to be able to say, 'We don't care about politics, just let us get on with building prosperity', but no longer. It's therefore no surprise that, probably for the first time, we see a top-rank political pollster taking a seat at the top table of […]
You, dear reader, if you are better informed, smarter and more thoughtful than most other people, are also likely to be more in danger of making biased judgments. That is the conclusion from a new study (‘Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot’) – see here for Jonah Lehrer’s discussion of it, ‘Why […]
Where is the political ‘centre’ of the British electorate? Two new pieces of polling evidence suggest a serious long-term challenge for the Conservatives. Exhibit 1, Last week I ran an open-ended question: “In your own words, please say what words you associate with the phrase ‘left wing’/ ‘right wing’”. The most common answers are, as […]
I wonder if there's ever been a government which didn't suffer from mid-term blues? The hard thing is working out whether the recent steep decline in the coalition's polling numbers is merely a dip or a lasting trend. There's no certain test, but one can check the full range of trackers to see if the […]
The surest way of showing you don’t really understand modern politics is to call Boris a buffoon. Not only does the word, with its overtones of stupidity, profoundly misjudge the man, it misjudges the electorate. There is nothing clownish about Boris: clowns are never winners. Yes, Boris is highly amusing, using his wit subtly to […]
Has the political landscape truly changed? Or are we just experiencing a blip? There has been a wobble-inducing shift in the polls since the budget, and for a couple of moments we have even seen UKIP sneaking ahead of the LibDems. Is this the start of a Conservative calamity, with a serious possibility of a […]
At the last general election, YouGov (with The Sun and The Sunday Times) began a programme of continuous daily opinion tracking, including a new tracker for the UK, ‘Government approval’. Each day we not only measure voting intention; we also ask respondents ‘Do you approve or disapprove of the government’s record to date?' Last week […]
Janet Daley, writing in the Sunday Telegraph made a from-the-heart plea for less focus groups and opinion polling in politics. Here is a cut-down version: Politicians have never been so unpopular, while never has so much effort been expended in finding out what voters think and want… Never before in political history has more attention […]
The Conservatives have taken a hammering. Their polling numbers are significantly down, and it’s right that alarms bells should be ringing. This moment brings a real opportunity for Ed Miliband to paint himself as more on the side of ordinary people, and – of greater importance – more competent. But the situation shouldn’t be exaggerated: […]
The polling numbers for Ed Miliband have not seen much improvement in spite of the hammering received by the Conservatives recently. But does that necessarily mean the Labour leader is an insurmountable obstacle to his party’s success at the next general election? People still don’t see him as a future Prime Minister; but the question […]
British and American capitalism used to be solidly paired together and contrasted against the European version: it was the Anglo-American model (lower tax, less regulation, more energetically competitive) versus the Social-Democratic model (cooperative and unthreatening). In the last few decades, within the embrace of the EU and its regulatory instincts, British business has evolved into […]
Today is "Super Tuesday", when ten primaries occur at once. This is actually fewer than it used to be and this time it is unlikely to deliver a knock-out punch (for plenty of data on this see the Economist/YouGov polling on our American site). Four quick points: 1) Although support for Santorum is weakening, the […]
In political communications, one often talks of ‘framing the debate’ – that is, defining the way an issue is discussed by defining the context. It’s closely related to what behavioural psychologists call the 'anchoring effect', something so extrardinary that studying it makes it hard to maintain much hope in for rationality. The anchoring effect has […]
Political insiders love to speculate about which other insiders are really pulling the strings. Power is seen as an endless series of Russian dolls each packed inside the other, and at the core there's supposed to be a special group that is the true governing cabal. In The Spectator last week James Forsyth identified a […]
Last week ConservativeHome caused a political furore by urging David Cameron to drop the NHS Bill, arguing that it does little to genuinely reform the health service but would damage the government's reputation and thereby weaken its ability to fight successfully for genuinely radical causes. As a consequence, there was only a tiny bit of […]