Recent studies have shown that when presented with closed-ended survey questions, politicians often over-estimate the conservativeness of their electorates.
This article re-examines these findings using a combination of in-depth qualitative interviews with British political elites and quantitative text analysis of parliamentary debates. I focus on criminal justice and imprisonment, an area where politicians appear especially fearful of angering a punitive public. I find that in private, politicians and their advisers do not conceive of public opinion as a fixed entity. They believe that the public holds various, sometimes contradictory, policy-relevant ideas and that expressed public opinion is dependent on arguments made by politicians and the media -- in line with mainstream approaches from political science. Thus studies using closed-ended questions may exaggerate the certainty with which politicians over-estimate their electorate’s conservativeness. Quantitative text analysis of references to the public’s beliefs in parliamentary speeches indicate that in public, however, politicians talk about public opinion as if it is fixed and very conservative. This divergence is suggestive of estimates of public opinion being wielded strategically, to justify positions that they think will be electorally advantageous, as opposed to being a sincere revelation of private beliefs.
Tom O’Grady is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCL. He did his PhD in Political Science at MIT and worked as an economist at the Bank of England. Tom’s research focuses on political economy, political behaviour and political parties in the UK and Europe. His past work has examined long-term ideological change, attitudes to redistribution and the welfare state, and the politics of class, culminating in a recent book on the political economy of British welfare reforms: "The Transformation of British Welfare Policy". Tom is currently working on a new project on the politics of crime and punishment in the UK.