Political

Majority back same-sex marriage

From the polling published this weekend:

Would you support or oppose changing the law to allow same-sex couples to marry?
Support: 55%
Oppose: 36%

Amongst Conservative voters the results are 44% – 49% (which is a statistical dead heat, when you remember to factor in the  margin of error).

Interestingly, the majority support comes despite the lead-up to the question being a tadge inaccurate:

Since 2005 same-sex couples have been able to enter into civil partnerships. While civil partnerships offer the same legal rights as marriage, same-sex couples are not able to marry.

In fact, the legal rights aren’t the same, for example for some pension rights, so if anything that preliminary wording is likely to have depressed the true ‘support’ figure. (I’ve had a brief discussion with the pollster about this and they think it is very unlikely to have much of an impact. I’m not quite so sure, but either way we can be sure that the wording isn’t inflating the figure.)

UPDATE: YouGov has since tested varying the word to cover the above point, and there was no statistically significant difference as a result.

2 responses to “Majority back same-sex marriage”

  1. I didn't think that 44% – 49% was a dead heat when you factor in the margin of error. Couldn't the errors be in the opposite direction? I thought 46% – 46% was more of a dead heat.

    • Michael: It's a dead heat in the sense that we can’t say with confidence which of these two numbers is really larger than the other amongst the population as the margin of difference in the poll results is within the margin of error.

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