The Sun’s decision to forsake Labour and become – in England and Wales at least – a cheerleader for the Conservatives once more has excited fellow journalists and annoyed the Labour party in equal measure. This, after all, is the newspaper that famously claimed after the Conservatives’ unexpected victory in 1992 that ‘It was the Sun wot won it’. It is the newspaper too whose support was assiduously sought by Tony Blair prior to his landslide victory in 1997. Little wonder its latest change of mind might be thought to have sealed Gordon Brown’s fate.
There is no doubt the political sympathies of newspaper readers tend to mirror the views of the journal they read. But on its own this tells us little. It might indicate reading a pro-Conservative paper persuades people to support the Conservatives. But it could just as equally demonstrate that those who are already inclined to vote Conservative prefer to read a pro-Conservative paper.
To demonstrate that newspapers do influence their readers we have to look at how the political sympathies of those who consistently read the same newspaper develop over a period of time. We have to establish, for example, whether, compared with those who do not read a partisan newspaper, loyal readers of the Daily Mail are more likely to remain loyal to the Conservatives, or even more likely to switch to them over the course of time.
Research undertaken in the 1990s – when the Sun’s influence was last a subject of some interest – suggests this does happen. Newspapers do have some influence on their readers.
But it is a slow, drip, drip, effect not an instant reaction. Neither the Sun’s personal attacks on Neil Kinnock during the 1992 campaign, nor its praise for Blair during the 1997 contest, helped swing votes during the short three weeks of those two election campaigns. Only over a much longer period of at least a year or two does their influence become apparent. That influence seems to arise because consistently reading good news about a party helps foster a more favourable image of it in some voters’ minds.
Moreover, the effect is only a marginal difference, not a massive shift of sympathies. For example, over the course of the year or so prior to the 1997 election, regular readers of the Sun exhibited a three-point swing to Labour, whereas during the same period there was a three-point swing in the opposite direction among the electorate as a whole. That difference is in truth about as big as the impact gets.
Meanwhile, whatever influence newspapers are having is always working in more than one direction. If the Daily Mail is usually helping to incline some readers towards the Tories, the Daily Mirror is having the opposite effect. At the same time there are always many people whom newspapers are not reaching at all. Even in 1992 around one in three people did not regularly read any morning newspaper at all. Now that figure is over half – a decline that is not in any way compensated by the advent of online readership.
So at any one point in time there might well be an imbalance in the political sympathies of newspapers. But the net impact on the aggregate outcome of an election of small effects that do not touch large sections of the electorate at all rapidly approximates something close to zero.
Meanwhile, with newspapers finding it ever harder to maintain circulation, they are acutely aware that if readers do not like what they read they can vote with their feet. The research conducted in the 1990s suggested that in just three years as many as 30% could decide to change the political character of the newspaper they read.
Here we come to the crux of the Sun’s decision. In 2005 45% of its readers backed Labour. Now only 29% do so. In switching sides the Sun has in truth simply recognised commercial reality.