Measuring What Matters
Knowing what issues are most important to the public is the bedrock of understanding voters. Ironically, its own importance can’t go understated.
It’s a question that is always popular with the press and pundits, especially when one issue receives a sharp increase in importance over a short amount of time. This has happened recently with immigration, which is now reported as being the most important issue to voters. This is because many pollsters ask the question in the same way, giving a list of responses and asking respondents to choose their top three.
However, this leaves a rich world of insight out in the cold. There are many reasons why this response doesn’t tell the whole story: it is too rigid, too sensitive to wording, and too shallow to capture the real trade-offs that people make. It misses the difference between what voters say matters for the country versus their own daily lives. It also obscures when people deliberately reject certain issues as important because they dislike how the debate is being framed. For these reasons, Labour Together have aimed to apply some overdue methodological experimentation with this question.
Why have we done this? As it stands, the issues with the question as it tends to be asked are:
Too prompted: By giving participants a list of responses, researchers already prime participants on which subjects are important. If we attempt to get over this bump by working with a longer list of possible responses, it risks diluting the responses that actually are important. This can be checked by analysing open-ended responses.
Too affected by small word changes: This is not an issue that any poll can fully get around. Every question requires wording, so small wording shifts are inevitable. This means results can reflect the phrasing as much as the underlying priorities. Recognising this sensitivity is crucial when comparing across pollsters or tracking change over time. This can be checked with a simple RCT experiment, indicating word changes.
Too lacking in relative ranking: There are two ways of thinking about political priorities. The first is related to salience and often finds that the most front-of-mind issue for respondents correlates with the importance of that issue. Traditional, prompted questions tend to be based on this approach. However, the other approach is to see how a respondent rationally approaches which issues are important compared to each other. For instance, a respondent may say that both immigration and the cost of living are important, but that does not indicate which one they would say is more important than the other. This is worth testing, because if Labour expects to have robust political conversations about trade-offs, they should do so in the context of what the public finds important in comparison to other issues. This can be checked by doing a pairwise comparison, which is similar to a conjoint.
Too unfocused on what isn’t important: Related to trade-offs, the traditional way of asking this question does not consider that asking for what people find most important can also be reversed. By asking both for the most important and least important priorities at the same time, we can find a more nuanced view on how people weigh up their political priorities. This can be checked by doing a MaxDiff analysis.
Across methods, the picture is clear: immigration is highly salient, but when voters are forced to choose, the cost of living still wins out as the country’s defining priority.
The traditional ‘select three’ question shows immigration rising sharply into the top three, though its exact placing shifts with small wording changes. The open-ended approach confirms immigration’s salience but shows more nuance, with some voters stressing too much focus on the issue, and public services appearing as a broader, overlapping concern.
When forced into relative ranks through pairwise comparisons, cost of living dominates; with economy and health close behind; and immigration falling lower down the list. The MaxDiff analysis echoes this, putting economic issues firmly ahead but showing immigration as the most polarising: often chosen as either most or least important.
Together, we suggest that immigration is highly salient, but economic pressures remain the deeper anchor of voter priorities.