Politics UK

Eleventh Edition

Home › Part 3 – The Representative Process › Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Elections and voting

Chapter Summary

Elections are central to the political system of the UK, ultimately enabling citizens to hold to account their representatives at national, sub-national and local levels. Turnout in elections has tended to decline, and this is largely a result of a declining sense of citizen duty among the electorate and a weakening of party identification. Another consequence of declining party loyalty is greater electoral volatility: there are many more voters willing to switch between elections based on the performance of the governing party or their feelings about the party leaders. In explaining patterns of party support, Brexit has encouraged a realignment whereby age and education have replaced socioeconomic factors like class as the best predictors of how people might vote. These variables are particularly useful in explaining votes for parties other than the big two, since their origins and priorities have more to do with the ‘vertical’ division between liberals and internationalists on the one hand and conservatives and nationalists on the other.

Learning Objectives

  • To understand the purposes and importance of elections in Britain.
  • To be aware of the variety of electoral systems in use in the UK.
  • To have a grasp of how and why turnout has varied over time, from place to place and from individual to individual.
  • To be aware of how and why support for different parties has varied over time, from place to place and from individual to individual

Quizzes

Test your knowledge with the Chapter 8 quizzes!

Quiz

Discussion Questions

  1. Several different elections take place regularly across the UK, most of which use different electoral systems. For UK general elections, why does the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system continue to be the system of choice even though frequently being cited as disproportional and unrepresentative?
  2. There are several theories and frameworks which attempt to understand why people vote the way they do. Thinking about the most recent 2024 UK general election, which theory (or theories) do you think best accounts for Labour’s landslide victory?

Electoral Calculus – A site predicting UK election outcomes based on polling data. (https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html)

Mark Pack’s Weekly Polling Blog – A blog analysing UK polling trends. (https://www.markpack.org.uk/171496/the-week-in-polls/)

British Election Study – A long-running study analysing voter behaviour and electoral outcomes. (https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/)

Electoral Commission – The UK’s independent elections regulator. (https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/)

Flashcards

Refresh your knowledge of key terms with this chapter’s flashcards.

Psephological

to do with the study of voting behaviour as shown in elections and opinion polls. The word derives from the Greek word psephos, a pebble. Classical Athenians voted by putting a pebble into one of two jars, one for the ‘yes’ votes, the other for the ‘no’ votes. It was a form of direct democracy.

Proportional Representation (PR)

a system of election that attempts to relate votes cast for the various parties to the number of seats won in the legislature. There are various forms of PR, with widely differing consequences.

Electoral System

a set of rules enabling voters to determine the selection of the legislature and/or the executive. Electoral systems have several often incompatible aims: to produce a legislature that is proportional to the distribution of votes; to produce a government that represents the majority of voters; and to produce strong, stable and effective government.

Plurality

electoral systems (especially ‘first-past-the-post’) that require only that the winning candidate has more votes that his or her nearest rival rather than an absolute majority. Such systems tend to produce disproportionate results.

First-Past-The-Post

the name given to the electoral system used in Britain and a few other Commonwealth countries such as Canada, in which the country is divided into single-member parliamentary constituencies and the winner is the candidate with the largest number of votes, irrespective of whether he or she gains an absolute majority. This can often produce highly disproportionate election results.

Alignment

a situation when the electorate is divided into reliable and stable support for the various parties. The British electorate was said to be aligned in both class and partisan terms from 1945 to 1970.