Is it time to rethink the rules on voting behaviour?

[john07]

Is it time to bin most, if not all of the rules of voting behaviour? I am referring to all the analysis painstakingly put together by Butler & Stokes plus others, regarding the impact of social class (A, B, C1, C2, D, and E), religion, education, etc.

I saw a poll from YouGov prior to the last General Election which showed next to no correspondence between socio-economic class and voting preference. The poll was a mile out in the final outcome and grossly overestimated to actual Tory vote but I think it as spot on in this analysis.

Only one variable seems to matter now and that is age. YouGov suggested that 36 was the break-even point and anyone younger than that were far more likely to prefer Labour and those older the Conservatives. Since then the break-even age seems to have moved to 46 or 47 as borne out by other surveys and the actual General Election results.

So the Conservatives have a loyal band of voters and followers in the over-65 group while Labour is streets ahead in the under-25s. On the face of it it appears to be a demographic time bomb for the Conservatives that could decimate their vote by the next couple of General Elections if those trends remain.

The obvious retort is that voters will continue to move to the Political Right as they get older. Some may point out that the ‘baby boomers’ once leading the move to the Left in the 1960s now constitute the bedrock of the Conservative vote. This is not actual true as none of the ‘baby boom’ generation would have had a vote before the 1970 General Election and that was won by Ted Heath.

The key reason for the pattern of voting by age is not hard to find. The over-55s are the ones with final salary pension schemes, the ones who benefited the most from owner occupation. The under-35s are the ones renting houses, working on zero-hours contracts, building up debt, and with dubious prospects of ever getting a decent pension.

Fast forward ten years and things will not have changed for the under-35s. The current over-65s will be in much the same position but they will be over-75s and there will be far fewer of them.

Thoughts please.

[The Bishop]

Labour still does significantly better amongst "working class" voters IF YOU JUST COUNT THOSE ACTUALLY WORKING.

[jigger]

Oct 17, 2017 13:49:29 GMT john07 said:

So the Conservatives have a loyal band of voters and followers in the over-65 group while Labour is streets ahead in the under-25s. On the face of it it appears to be a demographic time bomb for the Conservatives that could decimate their vote by the next couple of General Elections if those trends remain.

The obvious retort is that voters will continue to move to the Political Right as they get older. Some may point out that the ‘baby boomers’ once leading the move to the Left in the 1960s now constitute the bedrock of the Conservative vote. This is not actual true as none of the ‘baby boom’ generation would have had a vote before the 1970 General Election and that was won by Ted Heath.

The key reason for the pattern of voting by age is not hard to find. The over-55s are the ones with final salary pension schemes, the ones who benefited the most from owner occupation. The under-35s are the ones renting houses, working on zero-hours contracts, building up debt, and with dubious prospects of ever getting a decent pension.

Fast forward ten years and things will not have changed for the under-35s. The current over-65s will be in much the same position but they will be over-75s and there will be far fewer of them.

Thoughts please.

Not this old chestnut again. When the Labour Party is in a bit of a difficulty, articles get pumped out by the punditry (Janan Ganesh being a good recent example) saying that the Labour Party is dying. The number of articles that were produced between 2015-17 saying that the demographics of the United Kingdom were trending away from the Labour Party were almost too numerous to count. Now, just because the Conservatives have had a slightly poorer result than expected (but still got their highest vote share for 38 years), the punditry go for a total volte-face and declare that the Conservative Party is dying and the demographics are trending away from the Conservatives. Nobody who says that the Conservatives or the Labour Party are dying or the demographics are trending away from them should be taken remotely seriously, because they are totally wrong and there is not a scrap of evidence to support either assertion.

It is similar to what happened in America. Whilst I don't claim to be an expert on American politics, we had many articles after the 2012 election declaring that America was inexorably trending to the Democrats and that the Republicans would never win the Presidency again. Well that got proven conclusively wrong. And now, some article writers are saying that the Democrats are dying out, when they weren't that far away from winning the Presidency. It is ridiculous and worthy of total contempt.

[carlton43]

It is an interesting question but far from the whole truth. I assess the position to be as follows

1) Some relationship to age profile.
2) Some relationship to educational attainment.
3) A lot of relationship to final Salary pension provision.
4) A large relationship to Home Ownership with large equity and low debt.
5) Some relationship to body of debt.
6) Considerable relationship to position on Brexit.
7) Considerable relationship to position on Immigration.
8) Considerable relationship to Ethnicity.
9) Considerable relationship for the perceived underlying causes of personal disappointments.

There is a degree of strong overlap in some of these headings and of pulling in two directions for a number of people, and that accounts for the apparent trend for what had seemed to be safe areas for Party A moving towards Party B and vice versa.

My take still remains that the structure is very much trending towards the Conservatives medium to long term, but that differential short-term effects will be caused by good and bad rafts of policy and good and poor leadership qualities. I think the strong trend to the Conservatives has been muted by very poor leadership, awful organization and campaigning plus a quite good Labour campaign to three niche sectors.

[matureleft]

I'd agree about that projecting the future decline of the Conservative party is wrong. The party has pretty successfully evolved through its long history.

With the growth of further and higher education over the last 40 years, educational attainment may be in part a proxy of age, but is probably an indicator? Ethnicity (although there are certainly nuances) remains a major factor. Another factor certainly used to be geography, with residents of broadly similar socio-economic class, in similar housing stock, voting very differently apparently according to the political culture of the area in which they lived. 2017 seemed to show much less of that. There's probably something in some other economic factors - public sector employment, self-employment. Housing ownership and occupation remains an indicator (although with qualifications - high owner occupation doesn't always indicate Conservative voting behaviour). 

[Devil Wincarnate]

Oct 17, 2017 13:49:29 GMT john07 said:

Is it time to bin most, if not all of the rules of voting behaviour? I am referring to all the analysis painstakingly put together by Butler & Stokes plus others, regarding the impact of social class (A, B, C1, C2, D, and E), religion, education, etc.

I saw a poll from YouGov prior to the last General Election which showed next to no correspondence between socio-economic class and voting preference. The poll was a mile out in the final outcome and grossly overestimated to actual Tory vote but I think it as spot on in this analysis.

Only one variable seems to matter now and that is age. YouGov suggested that 36 was the break-even point and anyone younger than that were far more likely to prefer Labour and those older the Conservatives. Since then the break-even age seems to have moved to 46 or 47 as borne out by other surveys and the actual General Election results.

So the Conservatives have a loyal band of voters and followers in the over-65 group while Labour is streets ahead in the under-25s. On the face of it it appears to be a demographic time bomb for the Conservatives that could decimate their vote by the next couple of General Elections if those trends remain.

The obvious retort is that voters will continue to move to the Political Right as they get older. Some may point out that the ‘baby boomers’ once leading the move to the Left in the 1960s now constitute the bedrock of the Conservative vote. This is not actual true as none of the ‘baby boom’ generation would have had a vote before the 1970 General Election and that was won by Ted Heath.

The key reason for the pattern of voting by age is not hard to find. The over-55s are the ones with final salary pension schemes, the ones who benefited the most from owner occupation. The under-35s are the ones renting houses, working on zero-hours contracts, building up debt, and with dubious prospects of ever getting a decent pension.

Fast forward ten years and things will not have changed for the under-35s. The current over-65s will be in much the same position but they will be over-75s and there will be far fewer of them.

Thoughts please.

I wonder how much of this plays out in a slightly different way.  Here in your old stomping ground, most of my friends and acquaintances who vote tend to vote towards the centre and centre-right, and have lived in Labour areas before.  Those friends of mine of a lefty persuasion seem to have found themselves in the Leftier parts of town even if they have gravitated outwards (such as the Heatons).  Could it be that there isn't just a movement to the Right as one gets older, but that as you mature and want a bigger place and a different type of life, you gravitate towards places that mirror your worldview and hence these voting blocs in certain areas replenish themselves?

[Adam in Stroud]

I think Ghyl Tarvoke was onto something in the piece he wrote (on his "I wrote a thing") thread - i.e. that there's a significant difference between the over-55 age group and the under 55 age group in terms of home ownership, pension pots and debts. To that extent the economic differences between old and young blocs - allowing for the massive oversimplification inevitable when dividing millions of people up along these lines - seem to me at least as significant as the income differentials between different classes.  

It is no longer automatically the case that some with a degree will have a better income than someone who works in a skilled trade (who would have been automatically middle and working class respectively 50 years ago) but you can be absolutely sure that a homeowner with a final salary pension or good pension pot is better off than a renter with no pension or a small private pension pot (especially if the latter is self-employed or otherwise in the gig economy and therefore presumably not getting any employer's pension contributions, final salary scheme or not.) The former is much closer to the old middle class in terms of income, capital and security and the latter is much closer to the old working class.

Of course overall conditions are more prosperous than even as recently as say 1960, and not everyone over 55 is in the former category nor everyone under 55 in the latter, but on the whole there are strong biases. So it's not just about the different attitudes of generations, there is something close to an objectively measurable economic class difference; whereas between ABC1 voters and C2DE voters the differences are much more attitudinal and much less measurably economic than they used to be. (Not that it has totally disappeared of course, the solicitor or doctor is still much better paid than the kitchen porter or domestic cleaner.)

I don't think this condemns the Tory Party to oblivion but it does present certain challenges. Thatcher was devastatingly effective at exploiting the social changes of post-industrialisation - simultaneously hitting Labour's union bases by dismantling a lot of heavy industry and offering home for the aspirational working class. We now seem to have a new category of voter who see the bases loaded against them in the same way that the industrial working class used to.

[Sibboleth]

Oct 17, 2017 16:36:56 GMT Adam in Stroud said:

It is no longer automatically the case that some with a degree will have a better income than someone who works in a skilled trade (who would have been automatically middle and working class respectively 50 years ago)

Right, but that's entirely due to the (drastically diminished for various reasons) social prestige and economic advantage given by having a degree. One thing that needs to stop immediately is the tendency to view everyone in the (always ridiculous, now actively perverse; a supposed sociological category that is comprised of occupations that are really not at all socially similar) C2 category as being employed in a skilled trade; actually such people are a clear minority in that category now, even if you take a very loose definition of skilled trade. A lot of very bad electoral analysis in the 1980s - by people like Ivor Crewe, so right to the top of the Political Science world I'm afraid - was founded on this error and it has percolated down to the talking heads and (now) to the internet sh!tposters. The map is not the territory.

[Ghyl Tarvoke]

Any claim that social class - in the sense of income, wealth and Capital Ownership as opposed to traditional cultural signifiers of class - is not the main divisor in British electoral politics can be refuted with this chart of 2017 election results in England



This btw is a much more class-divided chart that it's equivalent for the EU referendum would be, which should tell us something...

[swanarcadian]

Another obvious point to make is that Labour will need young people to continue to turn out for them, which they managed to do this year, but may not be able to continue doing. Virtually no-one under 50 will be able to remember anything other than a Conservative or New Labour administration. My gut feeling is that we may well have to endure the most left wing government we’ve ever had in this country in order for younger folk to wise up to its consequences.



Having said that, the fact that the Conservatives have only managed to secure an overall majority once in the past two decades in a general election, and the fact that the Republicans over in the States have only won a plurality in the popular vote once in presidential elections over the past two and a half decades does suggest that things are more challenging for the political Right than they once were.  Demographics seem to be the main factor - the London results this year perhaps illustrate it more clearly than anything else.

Let me put this to the forum: does anyone think that Labour would have polled 40%+ in 1983 had they somehow prevented the SDP from breaking away, and Michael Foot was still Labour leader?

[jigger]

Oct 17, 2017 18:06:29 GMT swanarcadian said:

Another obvious point to make is that Labour will need young people to continue to turn out for them, which they managed to do this year, but may not be able to continue doing. Virtually no-one under 50 will be able to remember anything other than a Conservative or New Labour administration. My gut feeling is that we may well have to endure the most left wing government we’ve ever had in this country in order for younger folk to wise up to its consequences.



Having said that, the fact that the Conservatives have only managed to secure an overall majority once in the past two decades in a general election, and the fact that the Republicans over in the States have only won a plurality in the popular vote once in presidential elections over the past two and a half decades does suggest that things are more challenging for the political Right than they once were.  Demographics seem to be the main factor - the London results this year perhaps illustrate it more clearly than anything else.

Let me put this to the forum: does anyone think that Labour would have polled 40%+ in 1983 had they somehow prevented the SDP from breaking away, and Michael Foot was still Labour leader?

I really don't like this line at all because although technically true, it is totally misleading. It doesn't account for the fact that the Conservatives were more popular this June than in the 4 most recent general elections where they've secured an overall majority of seats. The reason why they didn't get an overall majority of seats this year but did in the other less popular years was entirely due to the performance of Labour and nothing to do with the popularity of the Conservative Party. 

With regards to your point about whether Labour could have polled 40% in 1983 with Michael Foot as Leader and no SDP split , the answer must be yes. I have never subscribed to the view that the Labour Party or the Conservative Party can ever be "unelectable" under any leader or type of leadership. The Conservative Party and the Labour Party are just too strong in terms of breadth and depth of support to be discounted in a national election.

[jigger]

Oct 17, 2017 15:30:30 GMT carlton43 said:

It is an interesting question but far from the whole truth. I assess the position to be as follows

1) Some relationship to age profile.
2) Some relationship to educational attainment.
3) A lot of relationship to final Salary pension provision.
4) A large relationship to Home Ownership with large equity and low debt.
5) Some relationship to body of debt.
6) Considerable relationship to position on Brexit.
7) Considerable relationship to position on Immigration.
8) Considerable relationship to Ethnicity.
9) Considerable relationship for the perceived underlying causes of personal disappointments.

There is a degree of strong overlap in some of these headings and of pulling in two directions for a number of people, and that accounts for the apparent trend for what had seemed to be safe areas for Party A moving towards Party B and vice versa.

My take still remains that the structure is very much trending towards the Conservatives medium to long term, but that differential short-term effects will be caused by good and bad rafts of policy and good and poor leadership qualities. I think the strong trend to the Conservatives has been muted by very poor leadership, awful organization and campaigning plus a quite good Labour campaign to three niche sectors.

Why? Personally I am suspicious of claims that the country is trending towards the Conservatives and away from Labour and vice versa. My view is that the country is not trending in either direction at all. I would be interested to hear your thoughts as to why you think that the UK is trending towards the Conservatives.

[greenchristian]

Oct 17, 2017 18:06:29 GMT swanarcadian said:

Another obvious point to make is that Labour will need young people to continue to turn out for them, which they managed to do this year, but may not be able to continue doing. Virtually no-one under 50 will be able to remember anything other than a Conservative or New Labour administration.

And the fact that it's the under-50s who are suffering the negative consequences of four decades of Thatcherite/New Labour policy suggests that the younger generations will be reliably left-of-centre for quite some time to come.

My gut feeling is that we may well have to endure the most left wing government we’ve ever had in this country in order for younger folk to wise up to its consequences.

Of course, it is entirely possible that you will be wrong about the consequences of a left-wing government. From the point of view of many of us "younger" voters, the excesses of hard-right economics need to be corrected. The question is what longer term problems will emerge from whatever economic consensus replaces Thatcherism. And the chances are that those problems won't be entirely obvious for a few decades afterwards.

Let me put this to the forum: does anyone think that Labour would have polled 40%+ in 1983 had they somehow prevented the SDP from breaking away, and Michael Foot was still Labour leader?

In a scenario where the gang of four didn't split off in response to a Foot leadership is so different to the reality that we would need to know what had changed to guess how the election would go. Also, 1983 Foot is a worse campaigner than 2017 Corbyn, and 1983 Thatcher is a couple of orders of magnitude better at election campaigns than 2017 May.

But yes, the political contexts are very different. In the early 80s there was a widespread feeling that the Left were behind many of the country's problems (Winter of Discontent, etc.). Today, the very idea is ludicrous. We are in a different economic and political context, and both what is a good idea and what seems like a good idea have changed.

[East Anglian Lefty]

There were some interesting charts I saw in a comment piece before the election about the decline of class-based voting. One showed that Labour was actually doing better amongst AB voters than DE voters. Another showed that Labour did best amongst the lowest income groups, even allowing for the fact that most retirees have fairly low incomes.

Curiously, they didn't seem to notice the disjuncture between these two charts, and didn't draw the fairly obvious conclusion that the ABCDE categorisation is pretty much useless as a tool of class and income analysis.

[Foggy]

Oct 17, 2017 13:49:29 GMT john07 said:

On the face of it it appears to be a demographic time bomb for the Conservatives that could decimate their vote by the next couple of General Elections if those trends remain.

If the Conservative share of the vote is decimated by the 2027 election, they'd still be getting 38.1% which I think they'd have to be reasonably pleased with.

Oct 17, 2017 14:43:31 GMT jigger said:

Oct 17, 2017 13:49:29 GMT john07 said:

It is similar to what happened in America. Whilst I don't claim to be an expert on American politics, we had many articles after the 2012 election declaring that America was inexorably trending to the Democrats and that the Republicans would never win the Presidency again. Well that got proven conclusively wrong. 

You clearly aren't an expert.  As swanarcadian hinted at, the Democrats have won the popular vote at 6 of the past 7 Presidental election. That this hasn't prevented the GOP from taking the White House more often is down to the peculiar winner-take-all system used to pick Electoral College delegates.

Oct 17, 2017 15:30:30 GMT carlton43 said:

It is an interesting question but far from the whole truth. I assess the position to be as follows

1) Some relationship to age profile.
2) Some relationship to educational attainment.
3) A lot of relationship to final Salary pension provision.
4) A large relationship to Home Ownership with large equity and low debt.
5) Some relationship to body of debt.
6) Considerable relationship to position on Brexit.
7) Considerable relationship to position on Immigration.
8) Considerable relationship to Ethnicity.
9) Considerable relationship for the perceived underlying causes of personal disappointments.

All important factors, Carlton, but please don't let anyone make the mistake of downplaying or underestimating point 9! 

[john07]

My thinking here is that I cannot see any particular reason my the current 29-38 generation should move to the right. Very few will be owner occupiers. Many are in precarious employment even if not on minimum wage zero hours contracts. They all face the prospect of working well into their 70s if not beyond because of inadequate occupational pensions that are not goining to be inflation proofed. All the evidence shows that personal debt is rising rapidly amongst a number of demographics. I see no reason why that cohort will feel more secure economically in ten years time than they do now.

I have three children in that age group. Only my youngest daughter is currently an owner occupier. My son and my eldest daughter both rent and pay very dearly for accommodation. None are in what I would term secure well-paid employment. None have anything approaching an adequate pension scheme.

All this is very different to my generation. We always felt financially strapped especially when moving to a larger house with higher mortgage repayments but this was a temporary situation. A lot of us were in secure well-paid employment with final salary pension provision, inflation protected in many cases. Mortgages do get paid off and cost of housing does not rise with inflation as is the case for those renting. There was every reason why many in that generation would move to the Right, in economic terms, at least.

To say that this has always been the case is complete balderdash. The age gap in voting behaviour is unprecedented. Any Conservative supporter who is not concerned by this bloody well ought to be. The Conservatives have often done well because their support, in the older generation was always more likely to turn out. This seems to be rolled back somewhat in the last general election.

[Harry Hayfield]

In recent years I have come to these opinions on a number of topics:

Should voting be compulsory? : YES
Should there be a "none of the above" box? : YES
If the number of votes for "none of the above" is greater than the vote cast for the leading candidate, should that candidate be deemed elected? : NO
Should this be extended to local elections? : YES
In the case of unopposed returns, should a referendum be held in the ward to see if the electorate want that candidate? : YES
If the referendum fails, should the ward remain empty until the next full elections? : NO (but over the course of the term, the position should be job shared every six months by someone with no political connections or council connections)

[Arthur Figgis]

Oct 18, 2017 7:43:55 GMT Harry Hayfield said:

In recent years I have come to these opinions on a number of topics:

Should voting be compulsory? : YES
Should there be a "none of the above" box? : YES
If the number of votes for "none of the above" is greater than the vote cast for the leading candidate, should that candidate be deemed elected? : NO
Should this be extended to local elections? : YES
In the case of unopposed returns, should a referendum be held in the ward to see if the electorate want that candidate? : YES
If the referendum fails, should the ward remain empty until the next full elections? : NO (but over the course of the term, the position should be job shared every six months by someone with no political connections or council connections)

Meanwhile, in the real world.

[yellowperil]

Oct 18, 2017 7:43:55 GMT Harry Hayfield said:

In recent years I have come to these opinions on a number of topics:

Should voting be compulsory? : YES
Should there be a "none of the above" box? : YES
If the number of votes for "none of the above" is greater than the vote cast for the leading candidate, should that candidate be deemed elected? : NO
Should this be extended to local elections? : YES
In the case of unopposed returns, should a referendum be held in the ward to see if the electorate want that candidate? : YES
If the referendum fails, should the ward remain empty until the next full elections? : NO (but over the course of the term, the position should be job shared every six months by someone with no political connections or council connections)

Quite attracted to propositions 1-5 in combination, but cannot see how the final proposition could possibly be made to work ( who would do the choosing?). Would prefer the empty seat, on the basis (1) it might concentrate minds to come up with a solution , or (2) would give people what they wanted if that really was their preference. I would extend the empty seat principle to situation in proposition 3
Maybe  not the real world, but a really exciting alternative to the present shambles.

[Pete Whitehead]

Oct 18, 2017 8:58:52 GMT yellowperil said:

Oct 18, 2017 7:43:55 GMT Harry Hayfield said:

In recent years I have come to these opinions on a number of topics:

Should voting be compulsory? : YES
Should there be a "none of the above" box? : YES
If the number of votes for "none of the above" is greater than the vote cast for the leading candidate, should that candidate be deemed elected? : NO
Should this be extended to local elections? : YES
In the case of unopposed returns, should a referendum be held in the ward to see if the electorate want that candidate? : YES
If the referendum fails, should the ward remain empty until the next full elections? : NO (but over the course of the term, the position should be job shared every six months by someone with no political connections or council connections)

Quite attracted to propositions 1-5 in combination, but cannot see how the final proposition could possibly be made to work ( who would do the choosing?). Would prefer the empty seat, on the basis (1) it might concentrate minds to come up with a solution , or (2) would give people what they wanted if that really was their preference. I would extend the empty seat principle to situation in proposition 3
Maybe  not the real world, but a really exciting alternative to the present shambles.

Well it is obviously nonsense but more to the point it has nothing to do with the subject of the thread which is about voting behaviour . There area already numerous thread about voting systems