‘Bread, circuses, and polling errors: Are we truly measuring what matters?’

The most important part of the body politic is the stomach. The eyes can be distracted, the ears can be blasted with noise, but the stomach rumbles on. No matter how important anything else seems, it is the day-to-day and basic that make the big differences.

So, in this context, there is an issue with polling. Pollsters only tend to ask about importance in one way: listing out issues and asking for people to select their top three. There is a reason for this – it is consistent. Pollsters are able to benchmark against one another and their own past results.

However, this format skews the results. Salient issues always have an advantage over important ones. Things that are front of mind are almost always more likely to be selected from a list when asked.

READ MORE: Crime, welfare, abortion: Where could Reform threaten Labour next?

In a context where immigration tops most pollsters’ important issues, this salience point becomes particularly relevant. Why does a policy area that is not necessarily close to the day-to-day of most people often come up trumps?

In order to distinguish the important (the things that are deep motivators) from the salient (the things that are top of mind) we did some experimenting.

All questions need good wording, because even small tweaks make a big difference.

In this spirit, we started by asking the respected pollster, Opinium, to run a randomised test about what voters think are the most important issues facing the country. In one version, respondents saw “cost of living” as an option; in another, they didn’t. The group that didn’t was more likely to pick immigration. The NHS barely moved at all.

What the fallout of adding the ‘cost of living’ tells us is that something as small as tweaks to wording and the addition of options decides the ranking. Immigration’s rise is real, but fragile. If even small tweaks to wording can make a recognisable difference, we should dig deeper.

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We then decided to ditch responses altogether and simply asked: “What are the most important issues facing the country, and why?”. Many pollsters, including Ipsos, ask open-ended questions and get immigration on top. We did the same, and got the same result. However, we found some nuance.

People weren’t all saying the same thing. A Green voter told us there was “too much focus” on immigration. A Lib Dem voter said the country “needs to recognise the benefits immigrants bring while being reassured about small boats.” Immigration was high salience, yes, but not always high hostility.

These experiments, however, favour salience. It was time to bring out some trade-offs. This is where the real differences emerge.

We asked people to choose which issue mattered between two issues shown to them at random. Cost of living became, by far, the top priority, followed by the economy and health. Immigration fell several rungs.

As a last test of this trade-off style method, we asked people to pick both the most and least important issues from rotating lists. This method forces a sharper choice. It doesn’t just show what people reach for first. It shows what they’re willing to set aside.

Immigration stood out immediately. It was the most polarising issue in the country, as one of the most frequently chosen as most important and simultaneously one of the most often dismissed as least important. Some see it as Britain’s defining challenge, whereas others treat it as noise drowning out bigger problems.

In contrast, ‘cost of living’, was by far the most chosen result and barely had anyone saying it was the least important issue when shown. Despite the noise, it would be very fair to say that the ‘cost of living’ was the most important issue overall.

The poet Juvenal wrote that ‘bread and circuses’ were the foundation of power to the Roman state. His reading is cynical, that meeting basic needs is a placatory practice. This is not true – it is a necessary one.

Immigration is salient, polarising and important. Cost of living is foundational, unifying, and in some ways, even more important.

The best polling should identify this. Conventions are useful, necessary even, but can lead to superficial reading. The standard form of the ‘most important issue’ question rewards the loud over the quiet, when both have their place.

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The fundamental question of ‘what matters to the British public?’ cannot be sufficiently answered by just one wording or just one method.

It is incumbent on pollsters to be more nuanced in their asking, and it is incumbent on poll reporters and poll readers to be more nuanced in their reading. Pollsters who ask questions that go past salience are rewarded with a richer look at the public’s outlook.

The full report – Measuring What Matters – can be read here.

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