Under Giulia's leadership, the aim is to enhance and broaden the reach of the existing Behavioural Science capabilities within Public Affairs in the UK.
At the 1997 election, one of the most powerful forces behind Tony Blair's victory was "word of mouth" among ordinary voters. MORI tested the extent to which the general public were spreading the message of New Labour, and of the other main parties, as part of an adaptation of the Ipsos Excellence Model (MEM), originally designed to enable MORI's corporate clients to measure their relationships with their key stakeholders. We found that 10% of the adult population, more than four million people, said that they supported the Labour party so much that they would encourage others to vote for it without being asked; a further 21% would encourage others to vote Labour if asked for their opinion.
Four years ago some four million people, one elector in ten, enlisted in Tony's Army, saying that they supported the Labour Party and that they encouraged others to vote Labour without being asked. Only a quarter as many were canvassing others on behalf of John Major's Conservative Party.
Opinion polls measure the electorate's intentions in votes, not in seats. We can — if nothing goes wrong — measure voting intention percentages directly, and would hope to be accurate within our margins of error. But projecting the number of seats that a given share of the votes would give, although it produces a better headline, involves much greater uncertainties, and we rarely have the information we need to produce such figures with anything approaching precision.
The election begins with the most recently published polls* by all the companies showing Labour's lead over the Tories slightly lower than was the case before the election was called in 1997:
In last week's column I set out some of the evidence that suggests that the turnout in the forthcoming election may be even lower than in 1997. However, one aspect that I didn't address was the political impact of a low turnout.
