Keywords: News, media, journalism and public opinion

In many countries, the performance of polling organisations is coming under increasing scrutiny and numerous calls for tighter state regulation of the industry. One of the most high profile examples is the current investigation by the UK's House of Lords into the state of the polling industry.

A 2017 Ipsos MORI survey of British public opinion found that, despite the bad press that opinion polls have recently received, half the public say that the generally trust pollsters to tell the truth. This level of trust is barely lower than in 1993, when MORI first conducted a comparable survey, and significantly higher than in some of the intervening years. Using data from some twenty surveys of the British public over this period, we look at who it is that tends to trust, or to distrust, pollsters, and whether this has changed over the last quarter-century. We consider demographic characteristics, notably age and education levels, and explore whether there is any link with party political support; and we also examine the extent to which trust in pollsters is positively or negatively correlated with trust in various other professions tested in the same surveys, including trust in politicians, trust in journalists and trust in “the ordinary man/woman in the street”.