Do young people struggle to engage with politics? And why do ethnic minorities vote Labour? Here are the answers according to a political book attempting to shed light on such questions

The British general election is firmly on the horizon - and you can count on there being piles of political analysis prior to, during and after the votes being cast.

What is the effect of a low turnout? Do the older generation identify more with a political party? To get a head start on some common questions and complaints about the British political system, we’ve compiled a selection of extracts from a book that aims to explore questions such as the above.

Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box by Philip Cowley, professor of parliamentary government at the University of Nottingham and Robert Ford, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester, is a collection of short essays written by leading political experts. Here are some excerpts from the book:

Voting together: why the household matters

As David Cutts explains, the household is the main location for political discussion and decision-making, with political values and norms being obtained and reinforced here.

“When one person in a household votes then, as a rule, so to do all the others: ‘Those who live together vote together.’ More than nine out of ten people who lived in a multi-person household where someone voted, voted themselves in the 2010 general election. Less than one in ten did so when living with a non-voter.”

Disengaged youth: age and political engagement

Alison Park states that “it’s certainly true that younger people are less engaged with politics than older groups.”

But does this change with age? Park writes:

“The graph shows that each cohort is less likely to identify with any of the available political parties now than they were when they were younger. Take, for example, the ‘60s generation; in 1991 (when they were in their twenties), 84 per cent identified with a political party but now 74 per cent do so. This is important because it runs counter to evidence published in the ‘60s that party identification increases with age, and contradicts the common intuition that voters become more engaged in politics as they age.”

“The graph also shows that each generation is less likely to identify with a political party than its predecessors.” Park explains that the small gap in party identification that existed between different generations in 1983 has steadily grown and although “young people have always been less engaged in politics than older ones”, she warns that “this gulf...is likely to carry on growing unless something major disrupts it, and will gradually drag down overall levels of engagement with political parties.”

The effects of low turnout

“One of the perennial questions triggered by low turnout is whether the outcome of the election would have been different had more people voted” writes Cees van der Eijk.

In the recent European Parliament elections, just 34% of voters chose to vote - that’s just over one in three.

Van der Eijk asks the question: “So, what would happen had more people cast their vote at the Euro elections?”

The British Election study survey results were used to estimate how non-voters would have voted had they gone to the polls. Although it’s not quite as simple as directly using peoples general election preferences as a substitute explains the author: “because many (approximately one in three) of those who voted in 2014 say they would vote differently in a general election to they way they did in the Euro election.”

By identifying the pattern of differences between preferences at general and European elections and knowing how these vary for different kinds of people, Van der Eijk writes that it is then possible to take these into account and apply this to respondents who did not vote in the European election but stated they would in a general election.

As the chart above shows “for none of the parties does the estimate differ by more than one percentage point from the actual result.” And as for Ukip? Van der Eijk writes that “had turnout in 2014 been twice as large as it actually was, Ukip would have done slightly less well - but they would still have done well enough to top the poll.”

Electoral bias

“Everyone knows that Britain’s simple plurality - or first-past-the-post - electoral system discrimates against smaller parties.” writes David Rossiter. But, he notes, it is “less well understood why, and how, it is currently biased against the Conservatives.”

The following example illustrates the problem:

“In 2010 the Conservatives won 36.1 per cent of the votes at the general election, in return for which 306 Conservative MPs were elected, twenty short of the number of needed for a majority. Five years earlier, Labour won 35.2 per cent but got 356 MPs, a clear sixty-seat majority in the Commons with a lower vote share than that which left the Conservatives twenty seats short.”

He also highlights the problem that occurs when a party’s votes are concentrated in areas where turnout is lowest. So for example, in 2010, turnout averaged 61% in Labour-won seats but 68% in Conservative-won seats.

Rossiter adds: “A party benefits if its votes are more effectively distributed than its opponents’ - if it ‘wins small but loses large’.”

Why ethnic minorities vote Labour

Anthony Heath writes:

“Ethnic background is now a much more powerful predictor of how people will vote than is social class (or region, or age, or indeed any other social division).”

The chart below shows the breakdown of votes during the 2010 general election. Heath explains that “the remarkable Labour loyalty of ethnic minorities could have major long-term implications for the party system as Britain’s minority communities are growing rapidly, and are set to become a larger and larger proportion of the electorate in the future.”

So why do ethnic minorities vote Labour? Although Heath does explore a few theories within this chapter, he points to new migrants who will “typically be joining an established ethnic community, which will have developed over time many shared norms and sentiments.”

“Migrants do not have to wait to find out for themselves what life would be like under different governments; they will quickly pick up ideas about the British political situation from their new community. Community norms and sentiments, then, may well perpetuate the belief, based on collective experience, that Labour looks after ethnic minorities while the Conservatives do not.”

Heath notes that group-based explanations have become less popular as the preference for individualistic choice-based theories grows, but states: “while communities based on social class may have declined or weakened, there are undoubtedly strong communities based on ethnicity in Britain today.”