Voting Behaviour Flashcards
What are social factors?
What are short term factors?
- Long term influences on voting behaviour, informed by one’s class, race, age, gender, and region (where they live)
- Short term influences are factors in the run-up to elections that impact how people vote, like the party leadership, contemporary issues, party campaigns, party policies, the media etc.
What is class dealignment? Why has this phenomenon happened?
What is partisan dealignment? Why has this phenomenon happened?
Class dealignment is the process in which people are less likely to identify to a certain social class, or the lines between the social classes have become less distinct, resulting in no strong affiliations to a social class.
> REASONS: embourgeoisement, growth of the middle class, lack of manual labour jobs, ease of having sophisticated items.
Partisan dealignment is the process in which people do not affiliate with a certain political party.
> REASONS: growth of ‘catch-all’ parties, parties are no longer strongly ideologically motivated and instead have policies that appeal to to all in order to gain more votes (‘broad church’), a more educated population may question loyalties to one party, access to media has meant that info on other parties is accessible.
Specific examples to illustrate class dealignment:
1983 GE - ABC1 voters
1997 GE - ABC1 voters
2019 GE - C2DE voters + working class constituencies
1983 GE - ABC1 Voters = 55% Conservatives, but only 16% Labour
However….
1997 - Labour increased their vote share in the ABC1 group by 12%.
2019 - 55% of C2DE voters voted for the Conservatives.
- the Conservatives held 31 out of the 100 most working class
constituencies, up from 13 the year prior.
More examples for regional impact on voting.
Scotland : Labour to SNP to Labour?
Scotland : Typically pro Labour with various Labour safe seats:
> 1997 = 56 seats Labour … 2010 = 41 seats Labour
However, post Scottish Independence Ref, the politics of Scotland changed drastically:
> 2015 = 56 seats, a gain of 50 seats from the prior GE.
UNPREDICTABLE
YouGov have Labour ahead in the 2024 polls for Scotland GE… recent by-election win in Rutherglen and Hamilton West which saw a 20% swing to Labour from the SNP.
Specific examples to illustrate regional impact on voting.
Typical Labour safe seats:
2019 fall of the Red Wall
The supposed ‘North/South’ divide in voting has come about as Labour typically gains many seats in their ‘Red Wall’.
Labour typically dominates cities and urban areas, whilst the Conservatives do well in rural areas.
> in 2019, the Conservatives had only 21 out of 73 MPs in London, and had NONE from major cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, or Bristol.
HOWEVER….
In 2019, the result in the Red Wall showed that the social factor or region is too unpredictable.
> the Conservatives took 43 constituencies in the Red Wall that Labour had won in 2017.
Specific examples of age on voting.
Age is actually a very useful indicator for voting behaviour, with younger people generally voting more for Labour, and older people generally voting more for the Conservatives.
2017 GE:
> 18-19 year olds = 70% Labour…. YouGov found that for every ten years older a person is, the likelihood they would vote for Labour decreases by six points.
2019 GE:
> If the electorate was only 18-30 year olds, Labour would’ve won its largest majority in its history.
> Conservatives had a 47 point lead amongst 65+ year olds.
Rational Choice Theory
The notion that voting is a rational act undertaken on an individual basis, with voters basing their decisions on political issues rather than other factors.
This is a reason why short term factors have become more important in explaining the outcomes of elections, which have become increasingly more volatile as social factors lose their relevance.
Issue of Brexit and impact on voting:
