Nick Sparrow to write on polling on PB

Nick Sparrow to write on polling on PB

I am delighted to announce that Nick Sparrow, formerly the head pollster at ICM, has accepted an invitation to write some articles on polling for PB.

To my mind Nick is the UK’s leading political pollster and in the mid-90s pioneered the system that we now know as “past vote weighting” to ensure political balanced samples. It was he who argued that the 1992 general election polling debacle was the result of samples based on demographic weightings alone no longer being sufficient. Nick also pioneered methodology to deal with what was then known as the “shy Tory” syndrome.

These approaches were first successfully tested again real results at the 1997 general election and over the coming years other pollsters have sought to follow Sparrow’s lead.

Hopefully Nick’s first article will be published tomorrow.

Mike Smithson

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