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Measuring British Public Opinion on the Monarchy and the Royal Family
Abstract
This chapter assesses public opinion, as measured through opinion polls since the inter-war period, and makes a distinction between monarchy as institution, and royal family—permitting insights into individual performances of the latter. As the chapter demonstrates, both the nature and volume of polling has changed radically from rare polls focusing mostly on peripheral matters to the modern reality of frequent and wide-ranging (although not necessarily systematic) polling. At one level, the early polls provide little insight but the shift informs of why there has been a change in focus and intensity of polls. Given that published British opinion polls are commissioned by the news media, the content evoked by polling is revealing of changing editorial agendas in relation to the institution, but also to individuals in terms of their performance ratings in relation to expectations of the institution and how royal individuals relate to these. Public support for the continuation of the monarchy has apparently remained rock-solid but not attitudes towards individual members of the royal family, something which this chapter reveals has implications for the survival of the institution.
In 1937, a year after ‘scientific’ opinion polling began in America, the Gallup Poll came to Britain. The British Institute
of Public Opinion (BIPO), owned and managed by Henry Durant, was Gallup’s first overseas affiliate. Although BIPO was a profit-making
concern, Durant operated the business for more than profit. He was a sincere believer in polling’s potential to democratize
government and business. Like his mentor Gallup, Durant fell short of his stated aims. The sample survey was not a precision
tool for ‘taking the pulse of democracy’. It contained irredeemable flaws that homogenized the private opinions of a skewed
cross-section of British society, while commercial pressures forced Durant to make trade-offs between cost and quality, and
clients’ needs and best survey practice.
This article examines the early history of opinion polling in British politics, focusing on the initial antagonism to polling methods within the political and media elite in the 1930s, and the gradual integration of polling into the political system after World War II. It rejects the technological determinism of scholars who assume that the adoption of opinion polling followed naturally on the creation of such methodology; and instead focuses on the time-lag between the advent of polling and its integration into political life. While not an explicitly comparative study, a major question which this study considers is why were British politicians and publishers so much slower to embrace opinion research than their American counterparts? In answering this question, this article examines various structural features of the British political system, cultural assumptions about parliamentary politics, and specific historical aspects of the advent of opinion polling in Britain which affected the reception of the new methodology. While this article concludes that structural factors--namely the return of a competitive two-party system after the Second World War--ultimately led the political parties to experiment with opinion polling, this article argues that continued ambivalence about the use of poll data can only be understood through a consideration of the cultural and historical circumstances surrounding the introduction of polling.
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