The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Engagement Hub ~ The role of numbers in engagement
Today we look, in our Engagement Hub, at numbers. Why is this the framing of numbers so central to political engagement? And what can other engagement professionals learn from it.
And of course, there’s the perennial outlier that is Charlie’s Attic, this week bringing you the psychological pitfalls of the fleabag era.
"It's the numbers, stupid"
We recently spotted this nugget on social media. It featured a graph, tweeted by Robert Peston, which shows that the majority of the public think halving inflation – one of Rishi Sunak’s biggest pledges – will reduce prices. The polling, which was by More In Common, found that just 34% got the correct answer when asked to apply the pledge to the price of a £1 pint of milk. (In the interest of showing workings, inflation is currently at 10%ish, so halving it would mean a 5% increase).
It is hardly surprising that so many struggled to deduce this correctly when put on the spot. We at TCC Towers found ourselves scratching our heads and having flashbacks to our GCSEs (Ed: you mean O-levels for some of us!). But, whilst Rishi Sunak may see this as further proof of the need to teach maths in schools, we wonder if it also says something about the use of numbers in politics – and by decision-makers more generally.
All numbers, after all, are context-specific, and the public often want to know simply whether things are going up or down. Hence the assumption that cutting inflation would mean prices fall, rather than that they merely rise more slowly than currently forecast. Indeed, a great deal of the numbers framing by politicians in recent years has been based on framing reductions in increases as cuts – or on casting reductions in cuts as increases. The public’s heads are understandably spinning at all this, and they frequently disengage.
There are a whole set of other questions about numbers, too. Most of us would back a £5m increase in school spending, for instance, without having a clue whether this would pay for an army of new teachers or a couple of crumbling portacabins. Hence there is a battle between those who use percentages to downplay the impact of public spending and those who use the raw figures to amplify it. A third approach is to look at what the figures mean for the average person (‘£75 for every child’) but these can themselves sound paltry.
If we look at some of the biggest arguments in British politics during recent years, they have all had relatively incomprehensible numbers at the core – from the size of the deficit to the ‘tens of thousands’ target to the £350m figure on the Brexit bus to the COVID R-number. For the electorate it has often been easier to engage with identity questions than to crunch the data.
These questions apply beyond politics, to anyone looking to engage with the public. Almost any decision worth consulting on will involve big numbers – in terms of money spent and the quantifiable impact of the hoped-for outcomes. The more those delivering this engagement can unpack and contextualise the figures, the better able they will be to genuinely include the public in decisions.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, where 2+2=guaranteed quirkiness each Friday:
