It is often assumed that modern public policy and political decision making is overly driven by opinion polls, and that opinion poll driven decision making can have a negative effect on the willingness of political leaders to make decisions in the public interest.

However, less opinion polling is conducted by governments and political parties than is often assumed, and where it is done, it is subject to significant limitations that reduce its effectiveness as a tool for understanding public sentiment and the acceptability of different policy options.

Despite public perception, decision-makers, media and stakeholders have limited access to information and tools to help them understand public opinion on a particular topic. Understanding of public opinion is often based on anecdotal evidence; incomplete, poor quality and advocacy-based opinion polls, or the views of people who claim to understand, or speak for, public opinion.

This creates the risk of a significant gap between perceived and actual public opinion. It can privilege the loud voices over representative voices. It can make decision makers overconfident in some decisions and risk averse in others. It can mean decisions benefit a small minority who claim to represent the public interest over the interests of others.

Overall, a poor understanding by governments, parliamentarians, media and other stakeholders of public opinion makes it harder to assess and determine the public interest. While public opinion should not be used to determine public policy decisions alone, a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of public opinion, and the motivations and drivers of that opinion, can assist in making the case for economic or social reform and improving the quality of public debate. Better understanding of public opinion would also provide a useful evidence base that might feed into other methods of supporting public decision making, such as citizens’ juries.

This project was designed to test the proposition that high quality, non-partisan, non-advocacy based opinion polling could become a useful asset in policy making. To test this proposition, a research project was designed to:

• Identify three key policy issues at different stages in the policy development process,
• Interview stakeholders on where they thought a better understanding of public opinion would be valuable,
• Commission three high quality public opinion polls from respected public opinion firms to gain insight into these topics,
• Present the results of the opinion polls to policymakers, and  Assess whether the insights from the opinion polling were valued by policy makers.