Most people seemed to agree that 2016 turned out to be a political rollercoaster of a year. After the shock result of the EU referendum and Donald Trump’s rise to the US presidency, there was a sense of fatigue in the air; many of us seemed to be worn out by it all.
So when UK Prime Minister Theresa May performed a startling U-turn on her previously stated position and suddenly called a general election for June 2017 – a mere two years after the 2015 election and less than twelve months since the EU referendum – the nation’s reaction seemed to be summed up by ‘Brenda from Bristol’ who gave this now famous response to a BBC news reporter: ‘You’re joking? Not another one? Oh for God’s sake, I can’t stand this. There’s too much politics going on at the moment. Why does she need to do it?’
With that feeling in the air, there were fears that voter turnout would be low.
Over the last fifty years, the general trend in many Western democracies has been for levels of voting to decline (except in countries like Belgium or Australia where it is compulsory, and failing to do so can result in a fine). Despite the fact that many people consider voting to be an almost sacrosanct civic responsibility, in democracies all over the world it is a right that millions of people regularly choose not to exercise.
Yet the number of people who voted in the British 2017 general election was – to the pollsters’ surprise – the highest in twenty-five years at 68.7 per cent (an increase of 2.6 per cent on the 2015 election, although still a long way off the 1950 figure of 83.9 per cent).
That seems like good news, but it masks a depressing truth.
For while the Conservatives may have won the largest share of the votes, with 42 per cent, that still means that only 29.2 per cent of the registered electorate voted for them, while 27.5 per cent opted for Labour. After accounting for all the smaller parties, that leaves the actual majority share with the non-voters, at 31.3 per cent – well over 14 million people.
In short, more people chose not to exercise their democratic right than voted for the party that won the election.
This non-voting majority sits in quite a stark contrast to the efforts of different disenfranchised parts of society – the working classes in the UK, black citizens in the USA and women all over the world, to name a few – who fought, and in some cases died, for the right to vote.
We’ve seen a number of ways in which the way we vote might be influenced. But what might make us choose not to vote at all, to disregard a privilege to which so many people across the globe still don’t have access?
One of the most common explanations for low voter turnout is that people are lazy or apathetic. As a psychologist, I struggle with this explanation. When people say they don’t care about politics, often what they mean is that they don’t care about the day-to-day workings of the government or politicians’ activities, but when it comes to how much nurses are paid, or who receives benefits, or whether very rich people are paying their share of taxes, most people do care.
Over the years I’ve talked to a lot of non-voters, and the reasons I hear most often are that they don’t feel they know enough to vote meaningfully, they don’t feel any of the parties really represent them, they don’t trust politicians, or they don’t even want to legitimise the political process.
But these are just anecdotal observations; what evidence is there to back any of them up? Let’s start with the problem of people feeling they don’t know enough about the political system.
One clear finding is that a lack of political engagement often goes hand-in-hand with dramatic gaps in people’s understanding of the political process. The Hansard Society has conducted an ‘Engagement Audit’ every year since 2004, documenting the levels of engagement and political knowledge in the UK. Some of the results are rather shocking; a regular finding, for example, is that less than half of the people they survey can name their local Member of Parliament. In 2013, just 22 per cent were able to do so.
Likewise, in 2007, 2010 and 2013 the survey results suggested that as little as half the population understood that as citizens of the EU they could directly elect their Members of the European Parliament. Yet in 2016 these same citizens were tasked with taking the momentous decision about whether or not Britain should leave the EU.
Such low levels of political knowledge are concerning, and the question of how to raise them an important one. Perhaps the problem partly stems from the fact we’re generally not taught about politics from a young age. In 2002, this gap in the curriculum was at least partially addressed by the introduction of ‘citizenship’ as a compulsory part of state-run secondary school education, but this does not apply to independent schools, academies or free schools, so its impact has been reduced accordingly. It is certainly true that for members of older generations such as myself, there was a really quite shocking absence of politics education at school.
Admittedly, teaching civics and politics in school is fraught with complications, particularly the issue of how to make sure the topic is taught without bias. At the same time, however, I wasn’t taught even the most basic aspects of how my democracy works, such as the distinction between the roles of a councillor, a Member of Parliament and a Member of the European Parliament. We are simply expected to pick this kind of information up for ourselves – and many people do – but surely far more people would feel engaged with our often complex political systems if we were taught the fundamentals at school.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, there is a link between educational level and levels of voter participation. Those who achieve a higher level of education are more likely to vote. They also tend to know more about the political process, and perhaps therefore how to navigate it. It is fair to say, however, that the effects of this link are more pronounced in some countries than others, which suggests that there are other factors also at play. For example, in both Sweden and the USA, having a university degree is associated with a better grasp of politics, but there’s a much bigger difference in political knowledge between educated and uneducated people in the USA than there is in Sweden. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Sweden is in general a much more egalitarian society, which could mean that differences in education result have a less pronounced effect.1
There is also some evidence that the type of media we choose to consume reflects our level of political knowledge. US citizens who preferred the ‘news’ over ‘entertainment’ were more likely to know about politics and more likely to vote.2 That hardly seems surprising, but the relation between engagement in politics and knowledge of politics is actually something of a chicken and egg issue. It’s difficult to know whether people don’t engage in politics because they have such a low understanding of it to begin with, or whether they have such a low understanding because they have no interest in engaging with it. The reality is almost certainly a messy interaction between these factors. But whatever the mechanics of the interaction, it does seem that the first step in convincing people to cast a vote is making sure they understand the system they are supposed to be participating in.
Of course, the fact that people choose not to vote can’t simply be explained by how well they know the system. Some people are happy to cast a vote despite not knowing how it all works, and some people abstain even though they do.
Another way people have tried to explain it is by looking at individual characteristics to see whether there are any traits associated with non-voters. One of the most interesting studies in this area comes from an organisation called the Common Cause Foundation. It was set up by Tom Crompton who, having worked on environmental campaigns for the World Wildlife Foundation for many years, wanted to understand the values that make people care about the world around them. After the 2015 election in the UK, Crompton ran a large survey of the UK population to try to understand, in particular, the values associated with the decision to vote.3
The study asked people whether they felt ‘compassionate’ values (honesty, responsibility, equality) or ‘selfish’ values (wealth, social status, popularity) were more important to them, and which ones they thought were important to others. The results showed that those with more ‘selfish’ values were slightly less likely to vote.
But Crompton also found that only a minority of people rated ‘selfish’ values as more important than ‘compassionate’ ones (and that was true for liberals and conservatives), with 74 per cent holding compassionate values overall. Interestingly, though, the result did vary across different age groups; older age groups were much more likely to endorse more compassionate values. This clearly corresponds with the fact that older generations are more likely to vote, a fact we will return to later in the chapter.
So much for the values that people considered important to themselves. What about when they were asked about what ‘others’ valued?
Well, it turned out that most people overestimated the extent to which others prioritised selfish values – it seems we assume others are more selfish than they really are. Interestingly, this finding also correlated with whether or not people voted: those who thought other people tended to have selfish values were also less likely to vote.
What do these findings tell us?
It seems fairly straightforward to explain why people who endorse more selfish values would be less likely to vote: voting takes effort, and perhaps those people are prone to being a little bit lazy and simply can’t be bothered to head out to the polling booth. Then again, political parties often appeal to the self-interests of different voters, so if one party offers you a tax-break, or free education, or a higher state pension, then you could imagine a selfish person being even more likely to vote. So it’s not that simple.
The second result is even more intriguing. Why would thinking that others are selfish make you less likely to vote?
It’s certainly a curious finding, but it is consistent with something we have seen throughout this book: what (we think) other people think matters to us – if we think our neighbours will know whether or not we voted, for example, or if we believe a large proportion of people buy into climate scepticism – this can have an effect on our behaviour. Why should the perception of others’ selfish values make a difference to whether or not we vote? In all honesty, I don’t know – this is definitely one of those cases where, as we scientists often say, ‘more research is needed . . .’ – but I would like to offer one potential explanation.
If you are intending to vote, and especially if you are going to vote in line with compassionate values, then you probably need a certain degree of faith that others share those values. Otherwise you may worry whether your vote will make a difference. To put it another way, if you want to vote for a more compassionate society, but think you are surrounded by people who will vote out of self-interest, then you might decide your vote is likely to be wasted. Perhaps, for some people at least, the decision to vote requires some degree of faith that collective action can bring about change.
Again, I want to make clear, this explanation is speculative, but it does rely on two factors that we know to be important: the role of faith and cynicism in the political process, and a sense of ‘perceived control’.
The idea that ‘my vote won’t make a difference’ is one that is frequently expressed in politics. Indeed, some statisticians in the USA have calculated that if you go to the voting booths, the chances of you getting run over are slightly higher than the chances of you influencing the outcome of an election.
Perhaps that’s true on an individual level, but collectively, if every non-voter became a voter, they could obviously make a huge difference – although we can’t of course predict in what direction. (It is certainly true that low voter turnout can lead to surprising results. For example in the UK, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is a relatively minor party, with no MPs, but with turnout in European elections being so low (35.6 per cent), it actually won the most seats in the 2014 elections for UK Members of the European Parliament.)
The depressingly low levels of political engagement in the UK are associated with a degree of cynicism about politicians and the political process, as the surveys conducted by the Hansard Society have repeatedly found.
This brings us to the idea that psychologists call ‘perceived control’ (political scientists tend to refer to it as ‘perceived efficacy’). How much control people feel they have over their lives is important in many situations – from the work place4 to schools.5 A recent paper in Cognition has found evidence that just realising you have control over something can be inherently rewarding in its own right.6 The authors argue this sense of reward could help to explain why millions of people use their limited time and money playing computer games like ‘Candy Crush Saga’. Simple games like this give us a sense of control – we’re able to very quickly work out what we need to do to gain points and rewards, and progress in the game, granting a kind of instant gratification for our desire to feel in control.
So how does perceived control affect our voting habits?
Well, we know that there is a clear link between how much people feel their individual vote counts and how likely they are to vote. We know this because we can compare the different voting systems countries use, which affect how likely an individual’s vote is to have a direct impact on who gets elected.
The USA and the UK, for example, both rely on a ‘winner takes all’ system, whereby in each local area the person with the most votes wins. This system (commonly referred to as ‘first past the post’) means that a political party could gain 10 per cent of the vote in every constituency in the country, and end up with no representatives in parliament, so long as another party got at least 11 per cent or more in each seat.
That means that in many parts of the country, particularly if you live in a so-called ‘safe seat’ (an area where one party has a consistently large majority that is unlikely to change), your vote is unlikely to make a difference. Perhaps unsurprisingly, turnout is much lower in safe seats.7
Conversely, if you live in a seat where the margin between the parties is very narrow, then your sense of control over the process is going to be higher, making you much more likely to vote. As an interesting aside, in these ‘marginal’ seats, voters also tend to have higher levels of political knowledge, perhaps suggesting that in safe-seat areas people feel it’s not worth getting involved, as the result is a foregone conclusion. Politicians know it too; voters in marginal constituencies are far more likely to be targeted by political parties, increasing the feeling that their vote counts, as opposed to voters in safe seats who frequently complain of being ignored and overlooked.
Many other democracies use a ‘proportional’ system; there are numerous versions but the basic idea is that if 10 per cent of the people vote for one party, then that party will end up with 10 per cent of the representatives in parliament.
Across the world, democracies with more proportional systems have higher levels of voter turnout, such as Germany (71 per cent), the Netherlands (80 per cent) and Denmark (88 per cent). Interestingly, voters in those countries are more likely to say they feel they have a sense of control over the electoral process.8 This is particularly true for voters who want to support smaller parties, and it’s a fairly logical consequence of proportional systems, as smaller parties (like the Green Party in Germany) are able to get more representatives in parliament. In contrast, the Green Party in the UK got 3.8 per cent of the vote in the 2015 ‘first past the post’ election but only gained 0.15 per cent of the seats in parliament, and UKIP got 12.7 per cent of the vote but only 0.3 per cent of the seats, while the SNP got 50 per cent of the vote in Scotland and a huge 95 per cent of the seats.
There are two interesting points to note here. Firstly, the higher levels of support for smaller parties in countries that use proportional representation demonstrates quite clearly that political beliefs do not simply cluster into a simple left- and right-wing party system – as they have traditionally done in the USA and UK. In Germany, for instance, there are a range of different parties, and support for them seems to be based on a more complex and subtle association between their stance on certain policies and the different personality traits of voters. For example, if a person scores highly on Openness, they are slightly more likely to support parties that endorse social liberalism; whereas a person with high levels of Neuroticism (those low on emotional stability) is slightly more likely to support parties that promote policies protecting against cultural challenges.9
Second, a person’s decision to vote is both a reflection of their individual characteristics and the nature of the voting system in which they find themselves. People will respond differently depending on the level of control they feel they have in different contexts.
There have been two recent examples of votes in the UK that offered people a greater sense of control: the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and the 2016 EU referendum. The most obvious thing to note about both is that turnout was much higher than for normal parliamentary elections. No less than 84.6 per cent of voters turned out for the Scottish referendum, for example, and 72.2 per cent voted across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland for the Brexit vote, compared to an average of 66.1 per cent turnout for the 2015 general election.
It seems that when people get the chance to vote directly on an issue of clear importance, they are more likely to make the effort to vote. It also appears that this boost in engagement can sometimes have knock-on effects; for example in the 2015 UK election, the turnout in Scotland was 71.1 per cent, much higher than in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This post-referendum effect might also help to explain why (despite Brenda of Bristol’s voter fatigue) turnout in the UK’s 2017 election was relatively high.
Another reason for the increased turnout in the 2017 UK election was because the younger generations (18 to 24 year olds) got more involved. Traditionally they’re accused of being too lazy and/or disengaged, and politicians tend to have stopped targeting them. And it is true that in 2015 the turnout among this age group was just 44 per cent.
But clearly we can’t simply dismiss them as ‘lazy’; after all it is unlikely that between 2015 and 2017 the youth of the UK underwent a radical shift in personality. No, what changed was the political context. Younger voters had already engaged in greater numbers than predicted in the 2016 referendum, a vote that saw stark differences across different generations (with over 70 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds voting to remain, while 64 per cent of those aged 65 and over voted to leave). The Labour Party then very explicitly targeted younger voters, with registration drives, using social media to bypass the mainstream media, and policies aimed at younger generations (such as educational allowances and free university tuition).
Most political pundits assumed this strategy wouldn’t work; the established wisdom was that the young don’t turn out, no matter what efforts campaigners go to. But the youth proved the pundits wrong (yet another incorrect prediction by our ‘experts’!). It seems that over the generations a negative cycle had built up whereby small differences in turnout between age groups were exacerbated by parties progressively focusing less and less on younger voters, leaving them less and less likely to vote.
The ways in which we can engage with and learn about democracy are changing. We have already seen that political parties are increasingly turning to social media as a means of winning our vote. We’ve also seen how the type of media a person consumes is linked to how likely they are to vote. However, this particular finding was published just before the explosion of media diversity via outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.
We don’t know what effect social media might have, but it’s possible that the ability to share information and collectively organise online might facilitate ‘nontraditional’ forms of participation in politics, such as the signing of e-petitions. This is one means of engaging in the political system that has been on the rise in countries around the world, even though voter turnout has been declining over the last fifty years.
Signing e-petitions, or ‘clicktivism’ as it has been derogatorily dubbed, has been dismissed by some as a lazy substitute for real participation. But I think that is a little premature. Whether modern ‘clicktivism’ has the potential to effect real, long-term change is yet to be seen, but it is certainly attracting certain demographics that have traditionally been less likely to engage in the political process; younger age groups and women are far more likely to sign and distribute e-petitions for example, as well as taking part in a range of other ‘non-traditional’ forms of engagement like protests and consumer boycotts.10
Former UK Prime Minster David Cameron responded to this trend in 2011 by launching an official petitions page on the parliamentary website. A senior figure in the House of Commons said this platform would offer the general public a ‘megaphone’ to make their views heard in parliament. Cameron guaranteed as much by decreeing that petitions with over 100,000 signatures would be debated in the House of Commons. In the first year alone, the petitions added to the site attracted 6.4 million signatures.
Although the public has clearly engaged with these e-petitions, we don’t know what the long-term impacts of this will be. If people feel that large-scale petitions are taken seriously and responded to meaningfully, then this could act as a ‘foot in the door’ for more of us to become politically engaged. At the moment however, even if a petition passes the threshold of 100,000 signatures, it often receives a very perfunctory response, and isn’t necessarily debated in the main chamber but in a small committee room with only a handful of MPs present.
If politicians are going to offer platforms like this, then they need to think carefully about how to respond without disillusioning people who are starting to show an interest in how their country is run.
Understanding why some people don’t vote at all can sometimes be even harder than trying to understand why they would vote for a party you dislike – especially if you see voting as an important civic duty.
But, just as we have seen in the science of why people do vote, there’s a lot psychology can tell us about why some of us choose not to.
The voting systems of countries like the USA and UK have resulted in the formation of a silent majority, where many don’t feel they have a sense of control over the process. As the political landscape changes, and new forms of engagement emerge, it’s interesting to question what might happen if that silent majority were to find its voice.