Sunday Polls - PR referendum and Scottish voting intention

Two nuggets of polling today. Firstly Mike Smithson has the voting intention figures from the SNP's YouGov poll, which shows a drop in support for the Liberal Democrats since YouGov's previous Scottish poll a week earlier.

Holyrood Constituency: CON 16%(nc), LAB 28%(+1), LDEM 14%(-2), SNP 36%(+2) Holyrood Regional: CON 17%(+1), LAB 26%(nc), LDEM 12%(-4), SNP 30%(nc)

Secondly, the Electoral Reform Society have released a question they commissioned from YouGov asking if people would be more likely to vote Labour if they held a referendum on changing the voting system.

On the topline figures, 17% of people say this would make them more likely to vote Labour, with only 6% less likely. Looks like this could make a real difference, doesn't it? Well, probably not, no.

Regular readers will know I have deep reservations about this type of question. Respondents tend to use the question to express support or opposition to a policy regardless of whether it would actually change their vote and saying "I'd be more likely to" is miles short of actually saying it would change your vote.

The way YouGov asks the question (giving people the chance of saying "No difference - I would vote Labour anyway" and "No difference - I wouldn't vote Labour anyway" to weed out some of the partisan answering) addresses these as much as it can, but I'm still very doubtful about them.

Looking at the detail of this one, YouGov gave people the choice of saying "much more likely" and "a little more likely", so we can at take those who are saying this would be a major issue for them.

The vast majority of people who say they would be more much likely to vote Labour are people who would vote Labour anyway (yes, it may firm them up, but realistically they are down to their core anyway. If you're still voting Labour now, you are pretty loyal!). That leaves us with 8% of Liberal Democrat voters who say they are much more likely to vote Labour if they give a referendum on PR.

With the Lib Dems on 17% in YouGov's last poll, that's the equivalent of just over 1% of the vote, and that's assuming all those "more likelies" translated into actual vote changes.

I suspect in reality if the government were to offer a referendum on PR at the time of the next election (which seems to be the suggestion that is floated sometimes) the actual impact on party support would boil down to whether the public ended up seeing it as a Labour attempt to gerrymander the system (which would presumably be how the Conservatives and newspapers opposed to it would try to paint it), and how the parties lined up in favour or against the actual referendum question and whether that made them look democratic, progressive and so on.