Polls Apart? The Public and the Monarchy

Two polls published on successive days this week - by MORI in the Sunday Telegraph [ROYAL FAMILY POLL] and ICM in the Guardian [Rising indifference to Royal Family] - seemed to suggest very different attitudes to the future of the monarchy and the Royal Family. In fact, their findings are far from contradictory, and although there are certainly some danger signs within them for the Royal Family they are by no means as bad as the Guardian's dramatic "SUPPORT FOR ROYAL FAMILY FALLS TO NEW LOW" headline might suggest.

First, let us make quite clear that there is no essential conflict between the two polls: they give a different impression simply because they concentrated on different questions. On the only question which both polls addressed, their findings were the same: "one in three of the public believes the monarchy should skip a generation and Prince William should be crowned king" when the Queen dies or abdicates, according to the Guardian's report of ICM's poll; 34% think "Prince Charles should ... give up his right to be the next monarch in favour of his eldest son, Prince William", according to MORI's Sunday Telegraph poll. No conflict there.

The Guardian's headline was based on a drop in the Royal Family's rating in ICM's main trend question, to its lowest level over the six polls in which ICM have asked it.

Q Do you think Britain would be better off or worse off without a royal family?

Source: ICM/Guardian

How significant is ICM's trend? One obvious point is that there seems to have been a big change between 1994 and 1997. Of course, this is by no means entirely implausible on the face of it - it was a period when the Royal Family suffered a great deal of bad publicity. But there is another far less obvious factor to take into account, not mentioned by the Guardian - there was also a major change in ICM's polling methodology between 1994, when they face-to-face, and 1997 by which time they had switched to their present method of interviewing by telephone. Could it be this which doubled the number of don't knows and cut the number of supporters of the Royal Family? It is not a possibility that can be entirely discounted, although such a dramatic shift in results while retaining the same question wording would be unusual. But it is instructive that over the same period, MORI used a similar but not identical question and found no dramatic rise in the number uncommitted in their opinions.

Q On balance, do you think Britain would be better off or worse off if the monarchy was abolished, or do you think it would make no difference?

Because the MORI question included an explicit "make no difference" option, the two data sets are obviously not entirely comparable. It is however worth noting that with the MORI version of the question, the numbers who say "better off" correspond fairly closely to the proportions who say they would prefer Britain to be a republic when the question is put in that form; with the ICM question, where those who don't feel it would make much difference either way presumably feel pressured to fall on one side of the fence or the other, the figures have been higher than the explicit support for a republic found in other polls. It should perhaps also be noted, however, that the ICM question refers to the Royal Family rather than the Monarchy, and there are almost certainly some respondents for whom these are not the same issue.

At any rate, since the ICM questions do not ask about support for a republic directly, the Guardian's writers were only able to speculate on the basis of their "better off" figure that "the level of republicanism in Britain appears to have changed little". If they had read the Sunday Telegraph, they would have found much more solid evidence in MORI's poll.

Q If there were a referendum on the issue, would you favour Britain becoming a republic or remaining a monarchy?

(Having mentioned the change in ICM's methodology it is necessary to point out that we made a minor change in the question wording in the MORI series during 1999, but as can be seen it does not appear to have affected the results.)

As the table shows, there has been no significant change in the level of support for a republic at any time in the last seven years - not even in the poll taken a week after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; every poll has found support for a republic within the 18% 177 2% band. As steady as it could be.

So, perhaps not quite so alarming for monarchists as the Guardian headline suggested. It all depends what questions you ask.