Public discussion and the liberal shift

Early one October morning at the time of the war in Afghanistan, I was listening to the radio. The newscaster wondered why opinion polls revealed a public in favour of British intervention in Afghanistan while ‘all those who phone this programme are against’. This woke me with a start, wondering what would happen next. More listeners phoned in. They spoke of self-selected groups and biased samples, but offered no explanation for the direction of the discrepancy. A few days later, in a televised debate, two well-known commentators spoke in favour of British participation in the war, and two against. A lively debate ensued in front of a studio audience of 100 people, who subsequently voted. The audience was selected by National Opinion Polls to be a representative sample of the British electorate. At the end of the debate the vote for continued British participation in the war was carried by a narrow 51 per cent to 49 per cent (Channel 4: War on Trial, 27 October 2001). Though opinion measures were shifting during this period, the studio audience was remarkable for its close result, given that a poll carried out by MORI on 9 October found that 71 per cent thought Britain was right to have joined the military strikes, 20 per cent thought it was wrong and 8 per cent did not know (MORI, 2001). Was the method of sounding opinion affecting the outcome?

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