Maybe people just like the idea of referendums?

I've got another blog post on the Opinium site (link here) about whether people really want a referendum on the EU or just like the idea of referendums generally with a bit of polling data to back it up.

The reason for looking at this is that we regularly see commentators and politicians citing polls that say the public are in favour of a referendum on EU membership. Before this they were polls saying the public wanted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and before that it was the EU Constitutional Treaty and the Euro.

But the flaw in these polls is that they don't measure intensity. Our questions ask using an agreement scale (Yes - definitely, Yes - probably, No - probably not, No - definitely not, Don't know/no opinion) but you can only really measure intensity by asking people to prioritise. YouGov do a "pick the top three" most important issues question and even among UKIP voters, 'Europe' is only selected by 32% and 20% of Conservative voters.



I generally like "pick your top three" questions as they acknowledge that people might be passionate about more than one issue but still force them to prioritise. I once, naively ran a question asking whether people thought various issues were important or unimportant and unsurprisingly they thought every issue was important. Lesson learned.

However, this still uses a prompted list which means that somebody who never normally thinks about, say, pensions, will be reminded that it is part of the group of "important" issues by seeing it on that list. Therefore I think what Ipsos MORI and the Economist do is slightly better.
Their "issues index" basically asks people to say what the single most important issue facing Britain is. It is unprompted and completely top of mind. A recent one is here and this series really highlights what a Westminster-village issue EU membership is. Europe isn't in the top 10. Immigration comes up fairly high which is something you could tie to EU membership (any "Leave" campaign in a referendum certainly will) but the long term trend shows that Europe hasn't been high on the agenda for years.

For me, the most interesting stat in our poll on referendums is that 56% of likely voters want a referendum on capital punishment. Hardly something that has dominated the news but something where the collective view of MPs differs from the latent feeling of a large section of the general public. The argument in my post is that people don't trust MPs and therefore like the idea of referendums on controversial issues. However, being in favour of a referendum when offered is not the same as thinking that it is the most important issue facing the country.