ComRes have an interesting post over on their site about differences between online and telephone polling so far this year (as well as making some extremely sensible points about the polls not being all over the place). As they correctly say, telephone polls this year have been showing a tiny Conservative lead, online polls a tiny Labour one. It’s only a small difference, but it’s there and it is not new – at the start of the year I produced a chart showing house differences between the different polling companies over 2014, and even then an online vs telephone tendency was observable: the two most “Toryish” polls were Ipsos MORI and ICM, both done by telephone. The most “Laboury” polls were TNS and Opinium, both done online.

Look a little closer though, and things are not quite that cut and dried. There are many causes of variation between polls, telephone or online fieldwork is just one of them. There is variation between different online companies and between different phone companies. Last year ComRes’s telephone polls actually produced some of the more Laboury figures, the online Populus polls tended be on the Tory side of average. Below is the average for each company so far this year (given the polls have been pretty static in 2015 I haven’t worried too much about timings of different companies polls, it’s just a straight average).

So all three companies who have been showing a Tory lead are done by phone, all the online polls have been showing an average Labour lead. But note the variation – MORI use the telephone, but they are showing a Labour lead on average. Two online polls (YouGov and Opinium) show barely any Labour lead at all, Survation, TNS and Panelbase average around a 2 point Labour lead. This is because there are plenty of other reasons for variation between pollsters too, different approaches to weighting, turnout, don’t knows and so on – I summarised lots of them here. Just looking at one can sometimes be misleading, for example, ICM and Ashcroft also reallocate don’t knows by past vote, which normally bumps up the Tory position by a point or so, so that will also be a major part of the difference between them and companies showing worse results for the Conservatives (one should also bear in mind that the monthly polling companies have only produced 3 or 4 polls this year – so a single odd poll like ICM’s this month has a large impact on the average).

I’ve no doubt that telephone vs online is one of the reasons for differences though, especially when it comes to UKIP. The graph below has even starker differences. With Labour vs Conservatives the difference between phone and online polls is a matter of a few points. With UKIP there is a vast gulf between the figures from different pollsters…

The companies showing lower UKIP scores are all telephone. The companies showing higher UKIP scores are all online. While there is little difference between the phone company showing the highest UKIP support (Ashcroft) and the online company showing the lowest (YouGov), there is a gulf of 9 points between the highest and lowest ends of the scale. Why there should be such a difference between online and telephone polling of UKIP we cannot tell – some of it may be an interviewer effect (people being more willing to tell a computer screen they are voting for a non-mainstream party than a human interviewer), some of it may be sampling (some online samples getting too many of the sort of people who vote UKIP, or some phone samples getting too few, or both). Until the results are in we won’t really know.