"Shy Tory factor" is a name given by British

opinion poll An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll, is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of qu ...

ing companies to a phenomenon first observed by

psephologists Psephology (; from Greek ) is the study of elections and voting. Psephology attempts to both Political forecasting, forecast and explain election results. The term is more common in Britain and in those English-speaking communities that rely hea ...

in the early 1990s. They observed that the share of the electoral vote won by the Conservative Party (known colloquially as the Tories) was significantly higher than the equivalent share in opinion polls. The accepted explanation was that "shy Tories" were voting Conservative after telling pollsters they would not. The general elections held in 1992 and 2015 are examples where it has allegedly affected the overall results but has further been discussed in other elections where the Conservatives did unexpectedly well. It has also been applied to the success of the Republican Party in the United States or the continued electoral victories of the

People's Action Party The People's Action Party (PAP) is a major Conservatism, conservative political party in Singapore and is the governing contemporary political party represented in the Parliament of Singapore, followed by the opposition Workers' Party of Singap ...

in Singapore.

Examples

1992 general election

The final

opinion polling for the 1992 United Kingdom general election In the run up to the 1992 general election, various organisations carried out opinion polling to gauge voting intention in the United Kingdom. Results of such polls are displayed in this article. The date range for these opinion polls are from ...

gave the Conservatives between 38% and 39% of the vote, about 1% behind the Labour Party, suggesting that the election would produce a

hung parliament A hung parliament is a term used in legislatures primarily under the Westminster system (typically employing Majoritarian representation, majoritarian electoral systems) to describe a situation in which no single political party or pre-existing ...

or a narrow Labour majority and end 13 years of Tory rule. In the final results, the Conservatives received almost 42% (a lead of 7.6% over Labour) and won their fourth successive general election, although they now had a 21-seat majority compared to the 102-seat majority they had gained in the election five years previously. As a result of this failure to predict the result, the

Market Research Society The Market Research Society (MRS) is a professional body for market research based in London, England. It was established in 1946 at the offices of the London Press Exchange. It represents the views of its members to government and in the press. ...

held an inquiry into the reasons why the polls had been so much at variance with actual public opinion. The report found that 2% of the 8.5% error could be explained by Conservative supporters refusing to disclose their voting intentions; it cited as evidence the fact that

exit poll An election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. A similar poll conducted before actual voters have voted is called an entrance poll. Pollsters – usually private companies working fo ...

s on election day also underestimated the Conservative lead. Following the 1992 election, most opinion pollsters altered their methodology to try to correct for this observed behaviour of the electorate. The methods varied for different companies. Some, including

Populus ''Populus'' is a genus of 25–30 species of deciduous flowering plants in the family Salicaceae, native to most of the Northern Hemisphere. English names variously applied to different species include poplar (), aspen, and cottonwood. The we ...

YouGov YouGov plc is a international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm headquartered in the UK with operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. History 2000–2010 Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim ...

, and ICM Research, began to adopt the tactic of asking their interviewees how they had voted at the previous election and then assuming that they would vote that way again at a discounted rate. Others weighted their panel so that their past vote was exactly in line with the actual result of the election. For a time, opinion poll results were published both for unadjusted and adjusted methods. Polling companies found that telephone and personal interviews are more likely to generate a shy response than automated calling or internet polls. In the 1997 general election, the result produced a smaller gap between the parties than polls had shown, but a big majority for the Labour Party because the swing was not uniform; the polling companies that had adjusted for the "Shy Tory effect" got closer to the voting proportions than those that did not.

2015 general election

Opinion polling for the 2015 United Kingdom general election underestimated the Conservative vote, with most polls predicting a hung parliament, and exit polls suggesting Conservatives as the largest party but not majority, whereas the actual result was a slim Conservative majority of 12 seats. Of the 92 election polls which met the standards of the

British Polling Council The British Polling Council (BPC) is an association of market research companies whose opinion polls are regularly published or broadcast in media in the United Kingdom. The current President is Jane Green. The BPC was established in 2004, ...

in the six weeks before the 2015 election, none foresaw the 6.5% difference in the popular vote between the Conservative Party and Labour Party. One poll had Labour leading by 6%, two polls had Labour ahead by 4%, 7 polls had Labour ahead by 3%, 15 polls had Labour ahead by 2%, 17 polls had Labour ahead by 1%, 17 polls had a dead heat, 15 polls had the Conservatives ahead by 1%, 7 polls had the Conservatives ahead by 2%, 3 polls had the Conservatives ahead by 3%, 5 polls had the Conservatives ahead by 4%, one poll had the Conservatives ahead by 5%, and two polls had the Conservatives ahead by 6%. The two polls that gave the Conservatives a 6% lead were published two weeks before the voting, and the final polls from those polling companies, published on the eve of the voting, gave a dead heat and a 1% Labour lead. The result was eventually a Conservative Party majority with a popular vote share of 36.8% with the Labour Party achieving 30.4%. It was later widely claimed in the media that the "Shy Tory factor" had again occurred as it had done in 1992. The British Polling Council subsequently launched an independent enquiry into how polls were so wrong amid widespread criticism that polls are no longer a trustworthy avenue of measuring voting intentions. This enquiry found that, contrary to the popular reporting, there was no "Shy Tory factor" in the election, and the polling had been incorrect for other reasons, most importantly unrepresentative samples.

Examples

1992 general election

2015 general election

See also

References

Further reading