Another day, another accusation of polling bias

Another day, another accusation of polling bias. YouGov is once again defending itself.

Stephan Shakespeare writes in a blog post today: “In swift succession, YouGov has been accused of being anti-Labour, anti-Conservative, and (yesterday) anti-Lib Dem.”

The anti-Labour claims come fairly regularly, what with the agency’s work for Rupert Murdoch and Tory links (ex-CEO Nadhim Zahawi left to stand for election for the Conservatives, while Shakespeare was a Tory candidate in 1997 and co-owns ConservativeHome.com). Labour made a complaint against the agency for supposedly overstating the Tory lead in the London mayoral election of 2008 – but quietly withdrew it after losing, as predicted.

The claims of bias against the Tories appeared earlier this month in this Telegraph story. The claims were apparently based on the fact that YouGov employs statistical weighting – hardly a shock revelation for anyone acquainted with how polling works.

The latest accusation is of alleged ‘push polling’ on behalf of the Tories, against the Lib Dems. Push polling is when a campaigner uses the guise of asking a survey question to try to influence a voter’s opinion or sow doubt in their mind, e.g. ‘Would you vote for councillor Willy Weasel if you learned that he was an ex-drug pusher and convicted paedophile?’ Naturally, that sort of thing is against all the rules.

When the Lib Dems learned that YouGov had been running negative statements about Nick Clegg past people in its surveys, they pounced on it. But YouGov denies the accusation and said it was conducting legitimate message testing.

Any high profile pollster is bound to attract suspicion, but when all sides are accusing them of bias at the same time, the credibility of each claim drains away quickly. We can’t help but wonder whether another reason the firm gets picked on is its online methodology, which is so easy for the media and casual observers to take pops at.