November 16, 2016

The Science of Polling

The pollsters got it wrong in the general election, the Brexit vote and now the US election leading some commentators to declare election polls as dead. So what is going on? Did the polls get it wrong because of innate weaknesses in polling or is something else going on here that can’t be fixed by pollsters? Is polling finished or can it be reformed for a new world? What, if anything, would society lose if we say goodbye to poll.

To answer these questions and any more you have, the SMC invited the UK’s leading polling expert in.

Professor John Curtice is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, Senior Research Fellow at NatCen Social Research, a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the British Polling Council. As President of the BPC,  he led the independent enquiry into the failure of the 2015 Pre-Election Polls.