others polled may give misleading answers, for a variety of reasons. Academic
surveys taken after elections regularly find more people claiming to have voted
for whichever party won the election than can have been the case given the
actual result. Because of this concern about artificially creating a result France
has banned the publication of electoral polls during election campaigns, and
similar demands have been made elsewhere. Despite these problems media
public opinion polls have a fairly good record of reliability, especially when
investigating clear cut issues, such as predicting the proportion of the vote
which is likely to go to each party or candidate. What they are less good at
predicting is the way regional variations, or the vagaries ofvoting systems,
might affect the final result of an election. Political parties make increasingly
extensive use of an alternative way of measuring public opinion, the use of
‘focus groups’. These are small groups of selected voters who are invited to
discuss issues at some length and depth. Although the results cannot be
generalized to the whole population with the statistical accuracy that a large
representative sample allows, they provide far more of an insight into why
opinions are held and how they might be changed.
Opposition
An opposition is a political grouping, party or loose association of individuals
who wish to change the government and its policies. In some democratic states
the opposition has a formal position and is expected to present itself as an
alternative government both by challenging the government’s measures
between elections and by offering itself as a potential governing party at an
election. However, this really only makes much sense in a cleartwo-party
system. In the United Kingdom the leader and some whips of the largest
opposition party in both houses of parliament are given formal recognition by
the granting of salaries; the role of the opposition is further acknowledged by
its right to reply to major government statements both in parliament and
through the media. Even systems which have no formal recognition of an
opposition leader find it necessary at times to treat some politician as holding
that postde facto; for example, after the US president’s annual ‘State of the
Union’ message, someone has to be given television time to reply, in the
interests of political fair play. (It is usually the Senate leader of the opposition
party, even though his party may have a majority in Congress). There have
always been problems about the way the opposition should comport itself—
cries are sometimes heard for the opposition to be ‘responsible’, that is, not to
attack the government over some particular policy. Probably the famous Tory
leader of the 19th century, Lord Randolph Churchill, had it right when he
asserted, simply, that ‘the duty of her majesty’s opposition is to oppose.’
Opposition