The Production of Opinion

The author Richard Seymour wrote in The Guardian about the polling industry, claiming that research companies do not ‘measure’ public opinion.

This article examines Seymour’s various claims.

“A 2% lead”?

Seymour’s screed begins with noting the differences in recent polls:

One gives the Tories a 10-point lead, another gives Labour a 2% lead.

Looking at the BBC’s poll tracker, the last time a poll estimated a 2-point Labour lead was by Opinium, at the start of July. What Seymour appears to be referring to is a hypothetical vote intention question asked by ComRes on 4–6th September about the following scenario:

A General Election is held after extending the Brexit deadline beyond the 31st of October

Hypothetical questions of this kind have their own problems — as people cannot fully predict their future behaviour — and should not be compared to ‘standard’ vote intention questions.

The BBC have now produced their own poll aggregator. (Source: BBC)

Nonetheless, there is a wide range of Conservative lead estimates.

The article continues:

Polling was once a specialised sector of market research. Now it is a niche area of the much bigger data industry, using the same Bayesian techniques of probabilistic analysis that stock markets employ…