How do you "engage" with British attitudes, respecting their endless variety and nuance? Pol.is (and its AI) can help

Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash

Could software help the majority of people come to a complex consensus on policy, in ways that are much more deeply founded than choosing between combatants in party-political Punch and Judy shows? We’ve all been watching - including on this blog - the way that vTaiwan has been benefitting from its digitally aware citizenry, by having them interact with government in a direct way.

The crucial tool they’ve used is an opinion-sampling platform called Pol.is (we’re in dialogue with them at A/UK right now). What’s unique about Pol.is, compared to other opinion-polling exercises, is that 1) the participants themselves largely shape the questions around the big topics they’re exploring. And 2) a set of algorithms and AI is able to sift through hundreds of thousands of responses, and identifies groups of likes and dislikes about these same questions.

The results are then displayed in ways that help everyone - both the commissioners and the participants - see unusual and unexpected consensus on issues. Bottom-up phrasing of concerns often articulate issues beyond the standard opinion poll questions.

From reports last week, this process has now firmly come to British shores. The Sunday Times wrote that Engage Britain, a new charity, has been using Pol.is software this year to talk to 5187 voters, who cast 422,031 votes on 1,085 challenges. As they put it:

The exercise shows that, in many respects, it is politicians who have created artificial divides. A statement put in well-known terms of party political rhetoric divides opinion much more sharply than the same statement put in neutral language.

Take, for example, Boris Johnson’s rallying cry of “levelling up” the North and Midlands after Brexit.

When put as a statement this garners a respectable 63 per cent backing — but other less politically divisive statements such as the need to rebalance the economy away from the southeast are much more popular with more than 75 per cent support.

Or crime which, before Brexit, was always a mainstay of British political argument.

One participant in the study wrote the following statement familiar as a classic Labour attack on the Tories: “The rise in crime correlates with a reduction in police funding.”

Such a “wedge” statement garnered a predictable response. Asked whether they agreed or disagreed, just over half backed the sentiment with the rest either opposing it or not giving an answer.

But more specific statements on the same issue resulted in far greater unanimity. Nearly everyone was concerned about the rise in computer and financial crime and wanted the police to take it more seriously. There is also widespread agreement that policing needs to be more focused towards neighbourhoods.

There are other areas of surprising consensus. Even on the NHS — often regarded as Britain’s secular religion — there are nuances to the public’s view.

While 77 per cent of people believe there should be more funds for the NHS 88 per cent agree with the statement that any additional money should be managed better.

But what about the issues that most divide us: namely Brexit and immigration? Even here there are glimmers of consensus when the public is in charge.

The single most popular statement on Brexit was for the government to articulate a clear vision for life after the EU, with the backing of more than 75 per cent of respondents. Support for a second Brexit referendum has fallen to 35 per cent.

On immigration the data shows a clear consensus that Britons do not want to pull up the drawbridge. Seventy-five per cent want a “clear, considered but compassionate immigration policy”. Just 22 per cent want to “stamp out” immigration because it is taking people’s “jobs and benefits”.

The study also throws up surprisingly strong views in areas that have traditionally been neglected and starved of resources by politicians and policymakers.

More than 90 per cent of the public want 16-year-olds to be offered routes to high quality skills and training outside the traditional college and university education.

More than 80 per cent want a ban on all plastic bags and wrapping. Julian McCrae, the director of Engage Britain, said that for too long policymaking in Whitehall had failed to tackle many of the “big issues” that affect people’s day to day lives.

“There has been a failure by successive governments to engage the public in designing the solutions to some of the issues that they really care about in their lives,” he said.

“People are not stupid. They understand the trade-offs involved and actually when it comes to the issues that matter they are often ahead of the politicians and less divided.”

Mr McCrae said that, even after Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, people were as much concerned about wider issues such as education, social care and the environment than those that have dominated the political and media narrative.

More here. Below is an animated gif that shows how support for various statements are gathered and bunched together. We’ve moved through the icons, but please go to the actual page for the full interactive experience. The one below is responding to the issue of the environment (as you move to the right of the graphic, there is more consensus around statements generated):

This is a very useful FAQ on pol.is as a technology and service. It’s important to be able to ask what the algorithms involved are, and how they do what they do - the heading, "How does Polis analysis work?” answers this technically, but we would certainly invite experts to come in and try to explain this activity further.

We were interested to read this blog, on Pol.is as a research method. An extract:

Though researchers may begin with seeding a conversation with particular prompts and opinions related to said prompt, the capacity of pol.is to then go several steps further.

It invite participants to react with their own words and then allow other participants to respond and react to those reactions.

This entails that the researchers will not be confined to capturing only the information they thought to collect from the group before they began their study.

This same functionality also allows researchers to, in real time, ask further follow up questions to the group on important but unexpected new themes that emerge from the conversation.

In this respect, pol.is essentially allows researchers to have, in one tool, both the systematicness of a survey and the sorts of rich, organic observations that are usually found through focus groups or interviews.

There is more beyond this unusual capacity to bridge breadth and depth of individually produced information. Pol.is is also able to provide a streamlined way for researchers to quickly look at and digest higher order information on the relationships between individuals and their responses to each other.

It specifically use patterns of agreement/disagreement to map the space of collective thinking and opinion—and then uses the actual content of conversations to allow researchers to interpret that space. Pol.is proving uncommonly objective in summarizing large amounts of rich social data quickly and easily.

More here. We’re report more here from our engagement with pol.is on how this is working with community opinion and democracy in the UK. Watch this space.