Growing in confidence, but losing touch: how the Conservative Party’s public opinion research changed during Thatcher’s premiership

It is widely known that political parties in office in parliamentary systems commission public opinion research in order to understand how to combine executing their policy goals with ensuring re-election at future elections. The information that parties in office collect may change over time, and these changes reveal much about party’s changing strategies and changing commitments to representing the views of citizens. I present data on the public opinion research carried out by the Thatcher government in office between 1979-1990, charting how an early obsession with tracking public opinion among key segments of the electorate lead to an early attempt at using psychographic data, before the party over-confidently abandoned its research programme after their third successive election victory. The case reveals how parties’ research programmes respond to their electoral performance, highlighting a new link in the relationship between public opinion and political parties’ behaviour.