UK election podcast 4
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to More or Less Election Podcast 4, a collection of interviews that were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4's PM programme with Eddie Mair. Tim Harford and Ruth Alexander have been taking it in turns to make sense of the numbers being used by politicians.
On Friday, April the 24th... Ruth Alexander from Radio 4's More or Less is here. Ruth, you've been looking at the opinion polls.
Yes, that's because we had an email to our email address more or less at bbc.co.uk if anyone else can be tempted. From a listener called Martin who asked, we thought, a rather good question. He said, every day we're getting polls. How come some say one party in the lead by two and some say the other party in the lead by two? Surely they should all be the same. Well, the reason they're not is because the pollsters aren't asking everybody in the UK how they're going to vote. They're asking a representative sample. Often it's just about one or two thousand people. And probably the best way to think about this is to picture a nice pan of voter soup bubbling away on the hob. A metaphor I borrowed from a professor of statistics, Kevin McComway, from the Open University, who is a keen, I'm told, but not always competent cook.
Anyway, taking an opinion poll is really like sampling a spoonful from this voter soup to see how the whole pan full tastes. But if you skim the surface, you know, you might just get croutons or you might end up with just a spoonful of mushrooms.
Mushrooms of the NHS.
No, they were when they were on the public spending pizza, but this is voter soup, which is quite different.
Please, not the pizza again.
No, let's not go there. So, you might just get a spoonful of mushrooms and you might miss the chickpeas, which have sunk to the bottom perhaps. So, it's important to stir your soup well and get a sample that includes all the ingredients in proportion. But even when you've got yourself a carefully selected sample spoonful that's representative, there's still room for error. The pollsters generally say that 95% of the time, a poll of 1,000 people will have a margin of error of plus or minus 3%. That means that a figure in the poll could be up to 3 percentage points higher or lower than shown, and that's the reason why different polls will show slightly different results, and their spoonful of voter soup is slightly different.
The BBC's poll of polls is suggesting the Conservatives are on 34 and Labour on 33. It's very close.
Yes, throughout the campaign, about 85 or 90% of UK polls, the vast majority, have shown there's between 0 and 2 percentage points between the two parties in the lead.
Why do different opinion polls show opposing leads on the UK election?
So that's where we're at, slap bang in the margin of error. And that's one of the interesting things about this election. The other is the fact that such a large number of people are saying they'll vote for a party other than the traditional big three, Conservative, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. In the last election, 12% of people voted for a party other than those three. This time, the polls suggest that figure could be at least double.
It's a big change in five years.
It is. And one, actually, you might not at first notice looking at the UK polls if you just focus on the big two. And there's another issue as well. Taking a spoonful of UK voter soup... is actually only of limited use when you've got such large regional and national differences as we do. I mean, you only taste a bit of the Scottish broth that's gone into it, for example. UK polls show only about 4% of the electorate think they'll vote for the SNP, but polls of Scotland show 40% to 50% of people, 10 times the proportion, saying they'll vote SNP, giving them a fairly consistent 24-point lead.
That would make it SNP soup.
On Monday, April 27th, Ruth looked at Labour's plans to introduce rent caps.
Their idea is that landlords would have to offer private tenants three-year tenancies with a right to cancel six months in, and rent could only go up with CPI, the Consumer Prices Index measure of inflation. which is used to uprate pensions and benefits and so on.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:35
2
Why do different opinion polls show opposing leads on the UK election?
2:35–4:26
3
How does sampling and margin of error explain poll discrepancies?
4:26–14:10
4
Why do UK-wide polls miss regional shifts like the SNP surge in Scotland?
14:10–16:40