One of the great strengths of the polling firm MORI is that they have consistently asked the same questions over decades, making comparisons across elections, decades and even generations possible.* One of these comparisons over time that has caught my eye is the level of public interest in elections:
Thinking back to the campaign, how interested would you say you were in news about the General Election?
1992: 52% very or fairly interested
2010: 75% very or fairly interested
That is a big increase in the level of declared public interest in election news. Turnout, however, was 78% in 1992, falling to 65% in 2010 even though both were elections which, ahead of polling day, were seen as close and without a sure overall winner.
It’s certainly a bit of a conundrum as to why people would be more interested in news about the election during the campaign but less likely to vote. So over to you for suggestions…
* The usual caveat about changing methodology applies, though as any polling firm always tries to have a methodology that works for how people are currently behaving, and so changing methodology over time is the right response to changing public behaviour, this is less of an issue than changing question wording. That’s because even small changes in the wording of questions can produce big differences in results regardless of other methodological considerations. A good example in the last Parliament was the leader ratings by YouGov, who used different wordings for different clients and got consistently different results, even though all the rest of the methodology was the same. Hence MORI’s consistent wording is a major boon.
14 Comments
Interesting numbers Mark 🙂
My thought on the lower turn-out is that many people, felt their vote would not make a huge impact anyway. Labour & Conservative offered what looked like a coin of two faces and we are constantly told that a vote for the Liberal Democrats makes *no difference. (*hindsight kicked that myth out)
The interest may have been increased though as a result of the addition of Social Networking as an additional medium. The debates too woke a lot of people to the idea that politics was not just about nodding, jeering eccentrics in a cloistered environment.
“The interest may have been increased though as a result of the addition of Social Networking as an additional medium.”
Yes – I daresay turnout would have been quite a bit higher if people could have voted by clicking a button on Facebook. But perhaps the effort of walking to the polling station is just too much trouble in the Internet age.
Anthony:
It didn’t help that there were issues with voting process in some places and indeed, an online vote (if it could be secure and free from interference) would have resulted in huge participation. Would be interesting to run an online vote alongside elections to practice how to get it right maybe?
Going to vote is not an effort but it is alien to new voters and off-putting for some. My daughter & friends voted for the first time this year …but were wary of the process. Would be useful if education included more about the power of a vote and how to use it.
It would be nice to the variations on the numbers based on ‘safeness’ of seats. People seem to be more engaged and interested in the process but they also appear to have become educated into the value of their vote and whether there is any point in voting in the first place. Time for a change in the voting system….
“It didn’t help that there were issues with voting process in some places …”
The figures I’ve seen in connection with that were only a few hundred people. Maybe 0.002% of the electorate?
Anthony:
Haven’t seen the figures for the voting problems – do you have a link to the investigation?
New media can lead to inaction, or the belief that you have acted without actually voting. (So the question now is, how can we guarantee converting ‘digital natives’ into votes at the polling station.)
So interest, facebook polls, activity, forwarding of news stories and general chatter was up, but actual turnout, down to you local polling station was down.
Would be interested to see a difference between seats with a heavier e-campaign focus (for us that is).
Tina
Here’s a link to the interim report:
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/99091/Interim-Report-Polling-Station-Queues-complete.pdf
It says just over 1200 people were affected, which I reckon is about 0.0026% of the electorate.
Thank you Anthony 🙂
Henry:
I recall an article at CounterPunch that talked about how we are fooled into believing we are doing something useful when we are at our keyboards… and yet we achieve nothing. However, this article was a few years back and with Social Networking becoming such an incredible tool, I believe we do achieve online.
We are in the midst of so much change and it is nearly impossible to predict what will happen next – which I think is an exciting place to be.
The 65% turnout is incredibly disappointing given the possible outcomes of the election were so open. However I worry that the narrative has ignored this low number, and indeed the reports on election night were of high turnouts, as that fitted with the scenes of voters being turned away from polling stations.
James, the safeness of a seat is correlated with (and I am convinced causes) lower turnout. Here is the plot of 2005 turnout vs 2001 safety: http://splithorizons.blogspot.com/2010/01/safe-seats-disenfranchise-voters.html I should remake this plot for this election when I get chance…
It would be useful if there was a seat by seat breakdown of the “how interested were you” question, so that respondents could be grouped into attitudes in safe vs marginal seats, and large vs small turnouts.
@Tina, you are right. We do achieve a great deal online. However, I do think the conversion rates from fb group to voting for instance – particularly for that new boost of young Lib Dem voters – was not quite as great as hoped. If it had been, that 30% may have turned out.
I count myself as a digital native and have no doubt that we will work out how to convert it to even more votes soon.
Henry:
I too am optimistic that what we learn, will strengthen what we go on to learn and then apply.
Disappointing that the huge changes that social networking are bringing, haven’t reached deeply enough into politcs; I have no doubt they will though.
I have seen the biggest changes in media and information sharing. During the London protests, I watched as Twitter informed journalists about the situation with ‘kettling’ and brought the truth of Ian Tomlinson’s death, to light. I get a broader view of any news item by going to Twitter and reading more sides to the story and then going on to research further.
There is an exponential element to all this that is going to continue to surprise us I think.
the fact people work (and commute) more makes a mid-week election harder to attend.
If you’re in a safe seat (which it seem around half the seats are), then you’ll be far less inclined to make the effort, even if you’re interested in the overall election.
And it probably would have been much worse without postal votings!
Back in 1992 or earlier, people may have been bored stiff by politics, but they knew where their class interests lay, and they very often voted accordingly. Nowadays they are rather less likely to know which party is best for their class, and that’s a good thing, I guess.
Back in the sixties, the Liberals boasted of being classless, and the polls bore that out. The Tory vote was highly middle-class, the labour vote of course highly working class, ours was fairly evenly spread.
Nowadays it is the Tory vote which is most evenly spread between classes. Ours is least even, and most biased towards classes A and B. Food for thought!