THE FUNDAMENTAL POINT conveyed in last week’s article was that the UK polls were not flawed, but had instead become a highly effective tool which influenced voters and this carries implications for polling as well as the political campaign which will be explored this week. In the former regard, it is again quite fortunate that the UK was the venue for this episode since they have a tradition of comprehensive analysis of elections, both before and after. In previous articles I made mention of the role played by the British Election Study (BES), a 50-year-old institution that is now managed by the Universities of Manchester, Oxford and Nottingham. This institution is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which funds social investigations across the UK.
The BES customarily reflects on every UK election to understand the lessons to be learnt and a key tool of theirs is the post-election poll that is entirely foreign to us in the Caribbean. In the past the BES has investigated electoral phenomena such as the very low voter turnout in 2001 and their findings were fascinating.
Specifically, they determined that some people who didn’t vote in the 2001 election lied to pollsters and said they did, which tells a story in and of itself. The main benefit of that study, however, was the revelation that the very low voter turnout (59 per cent) was largely due to the fact that public opinion polls predicted a comfortable win for the British Labour Party, hence most people didn’t think it was necessary to vote, either for or against, since their vote would have made little difference and moreover they were comfortable with that outcome.
One implicit lesson of the 2001 BES study that is relevant to this 2015 scenario is the clear indication that polls do influence voters, which is a suggestion that I have traditionally argued against. In 2001 the influence was for voters not to vote, but it seems likely that in 2015 voters were influenced to vote for the party and leader they were “less unfordable” with or alternatively to vote against uncertainty based on their assumptions of how others would vote. I am now persuaded that the pollsters’ influence is real, but considerably more complex than commentators here might realise. Indeed the suggestion of influence is perhaps the strongest evidence that people implicitly trust pollsters and moreover rely on their data to help them determine whether to vote or not and indeed the person or individual for whom they ought to vote. The appreciation of this trend will of necessity open the door to a discussion on the need to regulate polling more in the Caribbean than in the UK since the absence of any polling monopoly there helps to ensure self-regulation.
One presumes that the BES will shortly set to work on their analysis of the 2015 election and the role that polling played in that outcome. As was the case with the 2001 election, their findings will help to modify approaches to polling in the UK for the 2020 election.
One logical suggestion that seems likely would be to focus less on the “black and white” of a voter’s preference and more on the nuanced intentions which are related more to the voter’s expectations. This will be an enormous challenge for pollsters who will now need to delve into the realm of psychology, but I am confident that my colleagues in the UK will blaze a trail in this regard that will provide good lessons for us in the Caribbean.
On the political side there are also some profound lessons that the parties will need to take on board and the most obvious is the extent to which an individual’s political philosophy is flexible. In the UK, and to some extent here in the Caribbean, we assume that party supporters are reliable and motivated by the political philosophy of a party which is consistent. In the last election it was clear that there is a large bloc of voters in the UK who have the capacity to change the course of an election. Moreover that voting bloc is neither Labour nor Conservative, but willing to vote for either based on stimuli which become apparent even up to the day before the election.
This makes a politician’s work harder since he has to monitor his messaging up to the day of voting and entirely explodes the idea floated in 2010 that Labour had a government “put down” regardless of which Miliband they selected.
Clearly the era of the swing voter is upon us in the UK and I believe also the Caribbean. This should make the politician’s task considerably less certain, but will excite those of us who monitor politics because it levels the political playing field and presents elections as a genuine choice between options, with both having a possibility of emerging victorious.
Peter W. Wickham is a political consultant and a director of Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES). Email: [email protected]
