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ABSTRACT
Turnout at UK General Elections has remained stubbornly below post-war levels in the new millennium. Between 1950 and 1997, official turnout averaged 76% and never fell below 71% (in 1997); since 2001 average turnout has been 12 percentage points lower, at 64%. We investigate several possible explanations for that decline: the lack of competitiveness in recent contests; an increase in ideological similarity between the major parties; and partisan dealignment. Although electoral competitiveness affects turnout, and in the expected directions, it cannot readily account for the sudden drop in participation after 2000. But there is evidence that aggregate levels of partisanship are important: the unusually low turnout levels since 2000 are associated with unusually low levels of partisanship, and there are signs of a ‘threshold effect’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Charles Pattie is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and writes on elections and voting behaviour.
Todd Hartman is a Senior Lecturer in the Sheffield Method Institute, and specialises in political psychology, political attitudes, and intergroup relations.
Ron Johnston is Professor of Geography at the University of Bristol: he publishes widely on electoral geography.
Notes
1 The change over time in turnout might be somewhat different to that suggested by the ‘official’ figures, and the difference may vary over time (Electoral Commission, Citation2016: 6; Mellon et al., Citation2018). However, Mellon et al.’s (Citation2018) ‘best estimates’ of corrected turnout in recent UK General Elections show broadly the same turnout trends (albeit at different levels) as the official figures.
2 Generational replacement provides a fourth possible explanation. Over time, younger generations replace older ones in the electorate. But if the new entrants to the electorate are less inclined to turn out than those leaving it, generational replacement may lead to an overall decline in turnout (Franklin, Citation2004; Grasso, Citation2016). To study the generational replacement effect adequately would, however, require a somewhat different analytical approach to that adopted here.
3 Polling data for elections between 1945 and 2010 are taken from Rallings and Thrasher (Citation2012): after 2010, data are taken from Anthony Wells’ UK Polling Report website (http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/).
4 Curtice (Citation2018, p. 31) defines Conservative-Labour marginals as ‘seats where neither (Labour nor the Conservatives) would have won more than 55% of the votes cast for Conservative and Labour alone … in the event that nationally the two parties had won exactly the same share of the vote at that election’.
5 The UK’s 1945 General Election was fought while the country was still embroiled in World War Two. As a result, many eligible voters were unable to vote, and the electoral rolls employed were unusually inaccurate (McCallum & Readman, Citation1947, p. 31–32): the turnout figure in that election is liable to be unusually misleading, therefore. All analyses reported in the paper have therefore been re-run excluding the 1945 result. The results are substantively unchanged. We therefore report analyse of the full period from 1945 to 2017.
6 Periodic reviews of constituency boundaries complicate the picture somewhat. New seats were adopted in the 1950, 1955, February 1974, 1983, 1997, 2005 (in Scotland) and 2010 (in England, Wales and Northern Ireland) elections, making the number of marginals in the preceding contest a less accurate reflection of the state of party competition on the ground for these elections than would normally be the case.