The Reform sting is really a story about who gets to manufacture political information (see comment linked below 👇) During the 9 GE between 1983–2017, polls appearing in Conservative-leaning newspapers systematically report lower Conservative vote shares than polls appearing in other news sources—and the difference becomes larger as election day approaches. In the final week, the estimated Conservative vote share reported by Conservative-leaning newspapers is 1.5pp lower. In the paper with @fetzert, we write that this pattern could suggest that polling is being used for “turnout engineering whereby aligned voters may be mobilised by a perceived worse expected performance in the run-up to an election.”

Linking back to the Reform sting, there are three separate failures here. A party seeking money from abroad to pay for polling. A pollster accepting an undisclosed commission, which sits uneasily with the industry’s own transparency rules. And newspapers running the results as independent findings without checking, or telling readers, who was behind them. Our work on UK general elections shows that polls published in the final weeks of a campaign can affect turnout: a poll is not a neutral piece of news; it is something people act on. [...] The practical answer is not necessarily to restrict polling, but to require disclosure along the chain. See expert comment link below 👇