When I met You Gov’s head of political and social research for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and founding director last month, general election preparation was in full swing. Joe Twyman was a very busy man.
“I was on three broadcast pieces yesterday and five the day before,” he says. “That means telling the world about what people think of particular issues. Earlier in this week it was living standards, then UKIP’s policy on immigration, and yesterday it was the debates.”
Joe’s input is highly sought after, reflecting how the market research company has taken centre stage as a very uncertain day in current British politics approaches. All eyes are on their election opinion polls as everyone tries to guess who might be running the country after May 7- and that’s mainly because nobody really knows, even after the heated leaders debate last week.
“What makes this election so interesting is that for the first time in some time we don’t know who is going to be the largest party in term of votes,” Joe says himself.
“Even if we did know who would be the largest party, we don’t know how that is going to translate in number of seats.”
“What makes this election so interesting is that for the first time in some time we don’t know who is going to be the largest party in term of votes.”
The polls that they produce have become a valuable source for journalists generally as well as specifically data journalists as they try to report on a continually shifting climate in British politics. The Times and The Sunday Times have an exclusivity deal with You Gov and its polling data – its digital political platform Red Box in fact relies on them for most of its data journalism- while other publishers “piggy-back” off the results that the organisation is required to publish by the British Polling Council.
The leading party in the polls changes constantly. Only two weeks ago Labour was leading by 1 per cent, but the latest You Gov polls now put the Conservative Party ahead by 2 per cent. But does it make it hard to make predictions if voting intention is so variable?
“It’s interesting and more difficult. We’ve moved away from a two party system, and the same time the electoral system has not changed at all. It’s that contradiction between the political system and the electoral system that makes it so hard to predict,” Joe says. “It has really attracted noise and attention.”
“It’s that contradiction between the political system and the electoral system that makes it so hard to predict.”
Comparing to past elections
The 2015 election is very different to the first covered by You Gov in 2001, a year after the organisation’s foundation. Instead of a three floor office near Old Street with a slide to the basement, the small team had set themselves up in a small shed in a garden near Westminster.
The winner was importantly more certain – Joe says that there “wasn’t any doubt” that Tony Blair was heading for a second term.
Yet still it was a period was not without its difficulties for the online pollster as it was starting up when the internet was still a new and somewhat mistrusted tool. Joe describes some of the hostility – or “abuse”, using his term– that they encountered.
“We just got attacked all the time,” he says. “People said that what we were doing was ‘voodoo polling’ and you can’t do things right on the internet. We were told that if you do things on the internet, you might as well throw out all the books written on survey research methods.”
People said that what we were doing was “voodoo polling”
Yet eventually the benefits of online polling became hard to ignore. “Once you can demonstrate that you can do things as well as the traditional methods, then the other advantages of polling online start coming out.” He now teaches survey research methods at four universities across the UK.
It is also much cheaper at one tenth of the cost of traditional surveying – and faster. While once it took 10 days to survey 1000 people with traditional phone call and pen and paper methods, online it now takes only 24 hours to collect 2000 responses.
Joe claims that they were battling for “five or six years” against people who claimed they were frauds before “things got better”.
Accuracy and neutrality
You Gov’s authority in public opinion though has mainly grown through its accuracy, where their polls have often got it right where others have not.
“In the European elections everyone over estimated Ukip except us,” Joe relates. “It’s stuff like that that gives people the certainty that what they’re seeing is a fair representation of public opinion.”
“It’s stuff like that that gives people the certainty that what they’re seeing is a fair representation of public opinion.”
It is also about fairness. The majority of You Gov polling work is actually in the consumer sector – 95 per cent in fact – including shampoo and dog food, and it is apparently common for companies to ring up to ask for questions asked to be swung in their favour or to get specific responses out of people.
Joe says that they always refuse these requests. “We are contacted by them two or three times a week, and we just turn round and say that we are not working with them. Nine times out of ten they then say they’re not working with us, and then usually around five to ten minutes they call back and decide to go with our questions.”
The abuse moreover that the organisation received at the beginning has not ended with the rise of You Gov’s reputation. Joe reveals that in fact their non-wavering stance of neutrality has been met with criticism from some clients, particularly during the Scottish referendum.
“As a company and myself personally, we were getting attacked on both sides. One side would be saying that they were not ahead so our questions must be biased, and the other side saying that they were not far enough ahead so we must be against them!”
“As a company and myself personally, we were getting attacked on both sides during the Scottish referendum.”
From Iraq to sex and politics
Joe’s career has taken him in multiple interesting directions, including an involvement in the first post-Sudan survey in Iraq . When the state fell in 2003, he found himself amongst a handful of his You Gov colleagues who were polling people in Iraq after Boris Jonhson when he was working for The Spectator suggested it would be a golden opportunity.
“How we seem to see it now is that Sudan fell and everything went to shit, but that’s not what happened,” he says. “There was a pause when everyone outside looking in went ‘what happens now’.”
“How we seem to see it now is that Sudan fell and everything went to shit, but that’s not what happened.”
But did he have to change You Gov’s methods for a war torn country where online polling might not be possible?
Surprisingly not. “All the methods and techniques we have learnt from Britain about internet polling were copied into Iraq. We knew we had to be smart about things and examine the social cleavages in society – what is it that unites and divides people – and then we had to sample it. It is those techniques that we replicated in the face to face interviews that we did in Iraq.”
He returned to Iraq only last year, but says the idea of doing that kind of polling would seem “ridiculous now”.
It is not just the serious issues that interest Joe. He has recently written about the relationship between the ballot box and sexual preferences for the book Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box by Philip Cowley and Robert Ford.
Could he then answer the final question that is on everyone’s minds – does a taste for BDSM really affect how people vote?
“Sadly not,” he admits. “You can’t identify voting intention by examining sexual fantasies.
“You can’t identify voting intention by examining sexual fantasies.”
“But there are some statistically significant differences between different groups of people in their sexual fantasises once you control other factors such as age and gender. “
There you have it.
Once Features Editor of the University of Nottingham’s Impact Magazine, Emily is now at City to add all things digital to her story-telling. Her aspiration is to become a reporter who can work on a beat and behind a screen.