This election result got me thinking about voter apathy. If only 2/3 of the electorate voted, and the Conservatives won 37% of the vote, that means they only had the support of 25% of the electorate.

Difficult to say that the public have given then a mandate to govern, when three out of every four people didn’t vote for them.

How does this compare to previous elections?

Turnout has been gradually falling since 1945, sharply in 2001 with a slow recovery since then. Added to this, the winning party has won with an increasingly smaller fraction of the vote (from around 50% between 1945-65, and with less than 40% in the last three elections)*.

These two factors added together mean that the support of the main party by the electorate has been falling steadily since 1945, resulting in the current result of the Conservatives having only 25% of the support of the electorate.

To put this in context; no post-war government has ever had support of more than 40% of the electorate. The highest ever share was in 1959, when Macmillan (Tory) achieved 39% (49% of the popular vote, with a 78% turnout).

The lowest? 21.5% in 2005, when Blair got 35% of the vote with the second lowest turnout (61% – the lowest was 59% in the previous election).

So whilst support of 25% is low, it is not unusual. In 1997 when Labour won a landslide victory, with a 179-seat majority – they only had the support of 31% of the electorate.

*I guess that the rise of smaller parties in recent years has something to do with this