Do we need statutory regulation of the press? Perhaps the press should be regulated, but in a non-statutory way? Or maybe we need statutory under-pinning of any regulation?
As the row about Lord Justice Leveson’s report has raged, I’ve wondered about another question: do the public even know what ‘statutory’ means? Let alone statutory under-pinning, which, as Matthew Parris noted, sounds like a type of corsetry.
We tested this, thanks to YouGov, in two ways. We split a standard YouGov sample of Britons (N=1584, weighted using YouGov’s standard weighting to reflect the population, with polling done 2-3 December 2012). Half of respondents, randomly chosen, were asked to write in what they thought ‘statutory’ meant. The other half were given a series of alternate definitions, from which they could choose one.
As well as the correct one (‘something that is required or enacted by law’), other options included ‘something that is voluntary or by agreement between consenting adults’ (in other words, the opposite of statutory), ‘something that is motionless, especially when used to describe politicians on the right of politics’ (or in other words a Statue Tory – boom, boom!), or lastly ‘something that arouses passion or strong emotion, especially anger, belligerence or desire’ (inflammatory, which some people seem to find Lord Justice Leveson’s report…).
I will admit that my expectation was to find low levels of understanding. Identifying the public’s ignorance on matters of public policy is the political science equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, and it is common to see Westminster enveloped in an argument using arcane language that the rest of the public cannot penetrate. I’m not alone in expecting this. Danny Finkelstein, The Times journalist, described ‘statutory’ as a ‘trade term’, and advised journalists not to use it, believing that most of the public would not know what it meant. Other estimates from colleagues have ranged from 20% down to * – the symbol used in polling results to indicate that whilst some people might have got the right answer there were not enough of them to constitute even 1%.
Yet I am happy – if not delighted – to admit that I was wrong. Whatever else they may or may not understand about the details of Lord Justice Leveson’s report, the public do at least understand what ‘statutory’ means, however we try to measure it.
With our open-ended responses, a clear majority produced a definition that was close enough to the dictionary one to qualify. The number of correct answers depends on how high you set the bar, and how precise a definition is needed. But some 61% mentioned law, legal, legislation, legally binding, or set out in a statute (‘as defined by the law’, ‘required by law’ ‘laid down by law’, ‘something given by a statute’ and so on). And another 11% mentioned some form of regulation or compulsion. Another common response was to see it in terms of entitlement (as in statutory maternity pay), and thus see the word as implying rights (‘you are entitled to it’). We coded such responses as incorrect, although we accept this is moot. But at a bare minimum, 61% of respondents got it right; more leniently, the figure is 72%. The best wrong answer – apart from ‘I don’t care’ – was ‘paper, pens, etc’; stationery and statutory do at least begin and end with the same letters. But responses like this were rare.
We got a similar level of correct responses with the closed questions, as reported in the table below.
With the closed responses, 78% of the sample identified the correct response. Broken down by party support, we found 80% of Labour supporters, 85% of Conservatives, and 91% of Lib Dems getting the right answer. Amongst non-voters the figure was just 51%, with the Don’t Knows as high as 35%. (This is, or at least should be, another nail in the coffin of the surprisingly persistent myth that non-voters are all very informed people, bursting with knowledge, but who are just put off politics by the parties…).
There were no real differences by sex, and some fairly predictable ones by social class (87% of AB respondents gave a correct reply, down to 80% of C1s, 76% of C2s and 68% of DEs. And in turn this came out amongst readers of different newspapers, which basically revealed high levels of understanding amongst the readers of all papers and none, save for the Sun and the Star (with the latter being worse than the former), although even amongst Sun and Star readers, a majority got the definition right.
Voters Get Definition of Widely Used Word Correct might not be seen as a major triumph for democracy. But it is so common in polling to find that the public and the politicians (and the pollsters) speak entirely different languages – as in Sybil, ‘with no thoughts or sympathies in common; with an innate inability of mutual comprehension’ – that it comes as a relief to find that that is not the case. However we tested it, we found clear majorities of the public who understood exactly what the word meant.
So fear not, journalists and politicians. You may use ‘statutory’ widely and without fear of confusion. Whether it’s a good thing or not, however, is something else entirely.
