Measuring political behaviour and attitudes

Heath, Oliver and Johns, Robert (2010) Measuring political behaviour and attitudes. In, Bulmer, Martin (ed.) Social Measurement through Social Surveys: An Applied Approach. Taylor & Francis, pp. 47-68. (doi:10.4324/9781315609492-5).

Abstract

To the casual observer, measurement in political behaviour might look a decidedly ropey business. Opinion polls frequently get election outcomes wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, as we saw in 1992 when a Labour victory was widely predicted, only for the Tories to return to power with something to spare. Moreover, even after the event, the survey tally of votes cast for political parties rarely matches their actual vote share, and levels of turnout are seriously over-reported, almost to the tune of 20 percentage points in the 2005 British Election Study (BES). These large discrepancies between survey estimates of political behaviour and official tallies are undoubtedly a cause for concern; if surveys cannot be relied upon to get these basic objective facts of elections correct, or even close to the true mark, then they have little hope of accurately measuring the less tangible concepts in political science, such as party identification and political attitudes. These doubts are clearly not without foundation, but at the same time neither should they be overstated. In virtually no other field of survey research are the results faced with such immediate tests of their accuracy; as Jowell et al. (1993) note, most are never tested at all. These ‘tests’ have provided a fertile ground for examining the sources of the discrepancy between survey estimates of political phenomena and the official results, and in this way prior research has been able to shed light on the nature and magnitude of many of the factors that influence measurement problems in survey research. The findings from this research have relevance for a wide variety of measurement problems, and as we examine in this chapter, lessons can be taken on board to improve our understanding of other less easily verified phenomena.

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Contributors

Author: Robert Johns

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