Experience versus Perceptions: Accounting for the NHS “Perception Gap”

Abstract

Between 2003 and 2006, annual Populus opinion polls have revealed a significant gap between personal experience and perceptions of the performance of national public services. The gap is most pronounced in the case of the NHS. In this paper, I examine whether social characteristics, party identification, newspaper readership, and variation in the levels of political awareness, issue salience, and partisan strength account for differences in evaluations of the NHS. Party identification appears to influence perceptions more than evaluations of personal experience; the evidence on newspaper readership is equivocal. Attaching importance to the NHS as an issue and strong identification with the Labour Party, along with social characteristics, party identification and newspaper readership also significantly affected the size of the gap between experience and perceptions. These findings suggest that perceptions, rather than views based on personal experience of the NHS, are more susceptible to partisan and, possibly, media influences. They also suggest that fluctuations in the NHS perception gap’s size, apparent between 2003 and 2006, are the product of changes in the intensity and direction of party support.