LAST CHANCE TO WIN £250 STORE VOUCHERS! Tell us about holidays with kids (open to anyone with a child aged six or under)

[HelenMumsnet]

Some have been calling it the Mumsnet election, so we want to know what you think - whether you'll bother to go and vote at all, and which political leader ticks your box.

This survey is open to every Mumsnetter in the UK. We will be repeating this survey regularly between now and the election, so please look out for it again. We'll be asking about topical issues in future surveys, too.

Everyone who completes the survey will be entered into a prize draw to win £100 in Boden or Amazon vouchers.

Thanks and good luck!

MNHQ

ooh I see manfrom linked to it already

it's the top report about analysing mori's 2009 data

I think it'll be quite interesting to see how mumsnet members intend to vote

(in a pointless statistical way rather than an interfering with anything way)

Foxinsocks - you are spot on. Also calling it the Mumsnet Election is just a laugh. Mumsnet is no more representative of the electorate than the shoppers in your local M & S.

done

done

It seems to be possible to complete the survey without being a registered user of MN -- or at least, if it is impossible there is nothing onscreen that suggests your results haven't been submitted.

Given the number of cyber-politicos who want to use talk forums as a way of influencing opinion during the election, does this not mean that the survey is open to abuse? The kind of abuse that effected (e.g.) the Today Programme's Person of the Year poll, etc). They won't be here this time, perhaps. But once there has been a headline saying '40% of MNers will vote Labour da da da', they will be all over the next one.

And if MN restricts the survey to registered users only, the same politicos will register with MN in order to vote. This is one of the ways that I'm concerned that excessive pursuit of publicity under the heading of the 'Mumsnet Election' will damage the site. Usership statistics will become less and less a guide to the size or nature of the community -- and the poll results themselves will be meaningless as a source of knowledge about MNers. Subsequent political livechats will be dominated by people who are only on MN to sway the perception of their party.

And a proportion of the people who join in order to poll will stay in order to canvass. Even though it is hard to draw a line betwen canvassers who are here as community members and those who are here purely instumentally, I think there is a legitimate distinction to be made, and I worry about canvassing being accidentally encouraged.

I'm not against publicity-seeking as such (Thready here again). But I do think there should be lines drawn about how actively, and in what ways, and with what results for the site, it is encouraged.

Plus, even without being swamped by politicos, the survey will not be a scientific reflection of anyone's opinion. It will be another resource for journos to add a little bit of 'colour' to their election coverage: it often seems to be the case that the Mumsnet element in journalists' election coverage is part of the colour and packaging of news, not part of the political discourse itself.

As such, the survey is likely to contribute to the white noise that detracts from constructive political discussion during the election campaign. Good article on that here.

Plus, of course, if one of the cyber-politicos wins the prize draw, you have the awful prospect of a political hack clad in Boden.

ActiveThread we'll only be counting the votes of members - this is why we ask for your nickname and email in question 1 - and we will restrict all future polls to those mnetters who were registered by Feb 1 2010. (We're not completely inept ).

Of course it's not completely fair and representative of either the country or MN for that matter but we think it'll be interesting nonetheless to track changes.

And to those who asked for more interesting questions - agreed we'll be jazzing them up a bit. This is just the first boring benchmark one. Cheers for the input.

Oh I see -- I thought that only those who wanted to be in the prize draw had to enter their name and email. I assumed that was why you could fail to enter your details there and yet still get through to the poll.

Very glad to hear that future polls will be restricted by join-up date.

Sounds like you should say at the front that it's restricted to current memebers Justine, or else you still might get hacks and 'opinion-formers' joining up to try to skew that data.

Can I have some Amazon vouchers please? Am too young for Boden

"Track changes" ? Do you mean this is going to be ongoing? And how will you "track" changes? Will you track individual voting intentions by user name or other?

I think everyone understands Mumsnet's need to make money. And although not that desirable, it's completely fair enough doing Joggler surveys and Ford surveys and other marketplace surveys and advertsing and stuff. But to seek political influence is really awful and alienating for the three of us on this site who are Tory.

LOL at political hack in Boden.

All opinion polls, given the amount of media space that they get, interfere with democracy. People change their vote, based on what they think they 'need' to do to get their party in/get the other one out.

I'm a market researcher, but I would happily ban all political polls in the run up to elections for this very reason.

I don't think there is a party political bias in the MN political stuff, is there, Swedey? Mn is about equal between Lab/Tory acc to the census they did a while ago?

DONE

Done, now gimme gimme gimme

I don't think it's awful that the Government are holding a meeting at the Dept of Health next week, led by the Chief Nurse and Andy Burnham to discuss the adoption of Mumsnet's miscarriage code of practice which will be attended by ourselves and all the key stakeholders, if that's what you mean by political influence, Swedey.

And as for 3 Tories on MN - well we'll see. As said, I think it's an interesting poll.

BIWI agree.

Justine The miscarriage code isn't remotely party political though. You need to be honest with yourself as to whether Mumsnet is being used politically responsibly. Why not campaign to stop faith schools manipulating their admissions or campaign to have maternity pay shared between the father and mother of the child so that women aren't discriminated against for decent jobs and promotion? Those things would make parents life easier.

We can already discuss election issues if we want to, I don't understand why MNHQ are trying so hard to force party politics onto the Mumsnet agenda. I would understand it more if you were trying to shape policy but you don't seem to be massaging the Mumsnet muscle in that way. Mumsnet is the new Basildon.

Parents' lives

"why MNHQ are trying so hard to force party politics onto the Mumsnet agenda"

Yes, that puts it quite well. The election preoccupation on MN seems in quite a large measure generated from the top, from the Gordon Brown webchat onwards. I mean, naturally there is an interest in discussing the election here, of course, but it has been stoked up quite a lot, and the voting intention poll will I am sure stoke it up furth by creating a lot of news coverage for MN. And the effect all this has on the perception of MN from outside seems likely to change how MN is on the inside. A unique rather warm and fluid parenting site now has the feel of a somewhat bolted-on party political element that we can get in a million other web locations. Some will like it I suppose, some won't. Meh. I just wish MN wasn't so damned appealing in other ways. Then I could walk away.

I would have thought the 'election preoccupation' is only what you might expect from any group of reasonably intelligent people in the last few months before a general election - it's pretty easy to avoid if you don't like it, surely? And I haven't seen any evidence that it's changed the 'feel' of MN.

Anyway, as LeninGrad says, it probably won't survive past June...