Ep. 211 UK Voting Behaviour - short term versus long-term factors

Hello everyone and welcome to Voting Behavior Land and a brand new episode of the A-Level Politics Show. If you are listening for free and like what you hear, why not subscribe to+++ for the complete back catalog of 211 shows at the time of recording and more besides. Just £1.99 a month, cancel anytime, deets in the show notes. Thank you for your support of this show, and now let's get on with it. Today we will be updating Episode 113 and the Voting Behavior and Media topic to take account of the UK General Election 2024. The question is this, evaluate the view that long term social factors better determine electoral outcomes than short term factors. Most voting behavior questions require you to compare one explanation for electoral outcomes with other factors. In 2023, the examiner asked whether election outcomes were influenced more by the media than by any other factor. Check out Episode 173 for how to answer that one. Yet today's pod, as mentioned, is taking in a lot of factors. It asks you whether long term factors are more significant than short term factors. The first thing we need to do before we get into the meat of the essay is to know what are long term factors and what are short term factors. I'll also round off the introduction with a list of key terms that you need to know. As I explain what they are, I'll also bring in the key terms that you need to use throughout your answer. So when we are talking about long term social factors, we are really just talking about demographic factors essentially. We may include a person's age and their social class. We may also consider ethnicity, religion, educational background, gender and also a place where somebody lives, the region, regional voting patterns and so on. There are a number of key terms associated with these long term social demographic factors. Let's start with social class, which is the classification of people based on their occupations and to some extent their income. Avoid using higher or lower class. Instead, use phrases like AB voters, which means high income people or DE voters, low income. And you also have your C2 voters. These are skilled manual workers whose vote is often crucial in deciding close elections. There is also the all important key term that you must use in any voting behaviour essay, class de-alignment. This term refers to a trend whereby fewer people associate themselves with belonging to a particular social class decreasing the impact of class on voting behaviour. It then has a knock on effect on partisan de-alignment. This is linked to class alignment because it means that fewer voters are committed to or loyal to a specific party associated with a particular class. Now, let's think about short term factors. These refer to any explanation outside long term demography, such as the election campaign itself, the four to six week period between the dissolution of parliament and general election day. Short term factors can also include analysing the significance of the manifesto, a policy document released by political parties during the election campaign that outlines what the party would do in power. It could mean media influence, including print, TV and social media. Short term considerations may consider tactical voting, which is when voters in UK general elections feel that their first choice will be wasted and therefore vote for another party that they feel will have a better influence on the outcome. Opinion polls could also be mentioned since these are surveys that are mainly used to establish voting intention and to assess leader's popularity and the salience, that's the importance of specific issues. And perhaps along with salience we should consider valence issues. Valence is another word for trust, trust in a party, trust in its leaders, trust in its economic competence, etc. Right, that's all the complex terminology out of the way. What is the direction of this pod? The direction of this pod is that short term factors are far more significant than long term social factors. Granted, there are long term social factors such as age and region that can indicate how specific voters will cast their ballot, but plenty of other social factors do not tell us much anymore, including social class as well as a person's gender. Indeed, valence issues are king, trust matters a lot and in some elections, so too do specific salient issues, I'm thinking Brexit in 2019. The media landscape is changing, but social media is a growing factor in determining electoral outcomes and the short term factors of manifestos and election campaigns can't be discounted either. Let's remember that Nigel Farage was not even planning to stand as a candidate just a few weeks before the 2024 general election and now he is riding high in the polls at the end of 2025 and his reform party's presence on the ballot in 2024 made a Tory defeat not just bad but posed an existential threat to his existence and amplified the wipeout. One more tip by the way, you need to compare long term and short term factors throughout your essay, so I will start each section giving air time to the idea that long term social demographic factors matter somewhat before trashing the arguments and ending each section arguing that short term factors are far more significant. Here goes then peeps. Granted there are social and demographic factors such as age that clearly matter in determining voting behaviour and others that appear to play an important background role such as region. In 1983 42% of 18-24 year olds voted Conservative and 33% Labour. This age demographic at that time was split in favour of the Tories, Thatcher had won over the young, age mattered therefore. Flash forward to 2017, it still matters but for a different reason. Here Labour enjoyed a majority of support from all age groups between 18-39, same story in 2019 56% of 18-24 year olds voted Labour and the party again enjoyed a plurality of support from all age groups under 39. The party's stance on tuition fees and its opposition to cuts in public services may explain the hardening of support amongst younger voters. Meanwhile the Conservatives enjoy substantial support amongst the over 60s with 57% of 60-69 year olds voting Tory in 2019. The crossover age in 2019 appeared to be 39 but every 10 years older a person was the likelihood that they would vote Labour decreased by 8 points. Age therefore is clearly a good indicator of how a person will vote. Did 2024 confirm this trend? Absolutely. According to YouGov the chance of someone having voted Conservative increases gradually with age with just under 8% of under 30 year olds voting Tory in 2024 increasing to 46% of 70 year olds and older. There's a clear left-right split 70+ year olds are opting still for the Tories or if not them then the more right-wing reform 61% voted for these two parties in this age group in 2024. Granted Labour is no longer winning as many young people as it was they may have been partly turned off by Labour's initial reaction to the Gaza War or its moderation on green policies in 2024. Also Labour's vote share is no longer so determined by age since the party won a plurality of support in all age groups apart from those over 60 but age is still massive in voting. Young people are still highly progressive if they didn't vote Labour then their vote went to the Greens or to the Lib Dems instead in 2024 perhaps only tactically maybe to get rid of the Tories and marginal seats. A whopping 75% of 18 to 24 year olds voted for these three parties Labour, Lib Dem and Green in 2024. Let's also turn to region where a person lives is also important Brexit and the subsequent elections in 2017 and 2019 appear to show that region was significant in 2019 the collapse of the red wall those constituencies that were declining industrial towns that had previously voted Labour reflected in part the regional voting patterns that became clear in the EU referendum. The Conservatives continued to do well in areas that are predominantly white, rural or suburban. After that election 2019 Labour MP Yvette Cooper argued that the Labour party risked becoming a party only for the cities. Likewise if you left aside London after the 2019 election the Tories had fewer MPs from cities than the SNP which only stood in one part of the country. However, however the 2024 election rather challenges the assumption that people in one region consistently vote for one party. Labour took 36 seats off the SNP in Scotland perhaps showing that short term issues are more important. The SNP was embroiled in a criminal investigation into its finances and had been blamed for the poor state of public services north of the border. Tory strongholds in the south crumbled the party lost 107 seats here but this region is not universally switching to Labour. The Lib Dems served as a viable alternative instead. This all points to less a marked regional shift that will become consistent over subsequent general elections but to an anti-Torre alliance that perhaps was unique to this election 2024 whereby voters were fed up with the austerity and yet to be realised benefits of Brexit and most significantly partigate scandals and the Liz Trust's mini-budget. These are valence issues, short term factors centred around trust and alienation with the competence of the governing party. Far more so than the location of where someone lives or their age. These are the things that decided the election in 2024. Indeed, there is certainly a stronger argument that long term social factors are less significant. Some demographic factors such as class are no longer as important in determining voting behaviour and others such as gender are not that important at all. Let's start with class. In the 1964 general election Labour's Harold Wilson won 64% of DE voters while 78% of AB voters chose Conservatives. However, class-based voting has been undercut by class-dealignment and issue-based voting like on Brexit. These trends have in turn resulted in partisan de-alignment. Let's fast forward to 2017. DE voters broke 41% Conservative and 44% Labour. Not much of a gap, is it? In 2019, the Conservatives had a plurality of support from all social grades including AB and DE. If class was significant, you would see a different voting pattern for AB groups and DE groups, but in 2019 you don't get that. Same in 2024, there was little difference between how Tory and Labour vote shares stacked up regarding social grades. According to YouGov, class is therefore no longer as important as there is no clear divide between how different social grades vote compared to another. Both high-income and low-income voters had similar voting patterns in relation to switching from Tory in 2019 to Labour in 2024. Perhaps that just shows that when a party is unpopular, as the Tories were in 2024, they are unpopular across all backgrounds. Granted, class divides in voting might be expressed in other, more subtle ways. Maybe lower-income voters are opting for reform and right-wing anti-immigration parties. Some 19% of DE and 20% of skilled manual vote workers voted for Farage's party compared with only 10% of AB voters in 2024. Here again, though, maybe that's to do with a short-term salient issue, immigration and the issue of small-boats crossings that Sunach said he'd stop but didn't. Admittedly, education levels might be the new reflection of class. In 2019, 58% of those with GCSEs or below voted Conservative, while 43% of those with a degree or higher voted Labour. In 2024, the statistics were similar, with 42% of those with a degree or higher opting for Labour and just 18% for Tory. Meanwhile, Reform UK is considerably more popular in 2024 amongst those with GCSEs or lower. You could also make the case that class plays a massive role still in how political parties fight campaigns. The Tories targeted the so-called left-behind towns in 2017 and 2019, winning Labour's red wall of former industrial areas with heaps of working class votes, lending their vote to the Tories for the first time. Therefore, class is manifested in a number of ways, including educational background, cultural attitudes towards specific issues like immigration and regional voting patterns. For instance, the Lib Dems targeted Tory well-to-do towns with a Gales bakery attempting to win over high-income professional types who didn't like Brexit and who also liked to swim in the rivers but couldn't because of water pollution. Housing could also be a manifestation of class. Those who pay rents rejected the Tories by big margins - just 12% of those who pay rent to a private landlord voted Tory in 2024, owing to the failure to build lots of houses. Meanwhile, the well-to-do folks who own their own home outright and perhaps don't want house building in their own backyard opted for the Tories in greater numbers - 37% according to YouGov, compared to only a quarter for Labour which promised lots of house building in its manifesto. Thus, class might not be directly so important as it was, but it's still there in the ether. Peter Polzer described post-war Britain as class being the basis of party politics and that all else was embellishment and detail. There was at the time of his writing strong partisan alignment. However, the three post-Brexit elections are the latest in a long-term trend of decline in class-based voting since the 1970s, even if class might be seen in more subtle indicators of the kinds I've described - education, attainment, housing, tenure and so on. I want to push back on this though. Are we simply forgetting Brexit? These areas voted heavily to leave. It's a salient thing then, not a class thing. 2024 saw Labour taking back the Red Wall. Now that issue has been resolved, it's a less salient issue and those voters are coming back to what they usually vote for. Let's also consider gender, another social factor that arguably is less significant than other determinants of voting behaviour, even if 2024 reveals a few interesting trends to look out for in future years. 34% of men voted Labour and 35% of women voted Labour in this election. Hardly any difference at all. There does appear to be a gender divide, but only amongst 18 to 24-year-olds where 65% of women voted Labour compared to only 46% of men. In 2024, this trend continued somewhat with more young women opting for progressive parties, indeed 23% voted Green, while double the number of 18-to-24-year-old men voted Reform, 12% of them compared to just 6% of 18-to-24-year-old women. Yet this is just a couple of elections and it's still the case that both young men, 18-to-24-year-old young men and young women are more likely to vote Labour. 40% of men and 42% of women in this age category did so in 2024. Social influences are maybe having an impact on attitudes that men and women have towards politics more on that in a sec. Given that more women overall work in the public sector usually rely more on the NHS and also on benefits, specifically working tax credits, one may have expected to see a greater level of support amongst women for Labour in 2024 and in other elections recently, because that is the party associated with more generous public service provision. Thus, we can't say gender is particularly significant. The lack of a significant gap between how men and women vote or how different social classes vote thus indicate that these long-term social factors are not clearly affecting voting patterns. The lack of a significant gap between how men and women vote or how different social classes vote, which I mentioned earlier, thus indicate these long-term social factors are not clearly affecting voting patterns. It has to be something, it has to be something to do with short-term reasons. Let's think about valence and salience in more detail. Granted, we could make the argument that trust, valence and important issues, salience, do not matter as much as social factors. Blair made a huge appeal to middle-class voters in 1997. This shows that class still played a role. Meanwhile, Labour's defeat in 2019 had as much to do with regional vote patterns. The red wall areas of the North and Midlands had been moving away from Labour at least since 2015. Yet the short-term factor of valence is ultimately more important. In 2019, it was less about the red wall and more about trust. Some 43% of respondents in an opinion survey said that they cast their vote on the basis of leadership, highlighting how dislike of Corbyn helped shatter that red wall. Leadership matters and matters more than demographics. Miliband was seen as far less likable than Cameron in 2015. Sennach's approval ratings sunk in his last six months in office before the 2024 general election, and Ipsos Poll showed his net favourability at -36 compared to Stalmers +7. It didn't help that he left the D-Day commemoration early for an interview with ITV. Party unity and its record of competence also matters greatly. In 1997, Blair took advantage of the splits within the Tory party. In 1983, Labour were riven with division owing to the rise of the Benite Left, a similar issue for the party in 2017 and 2019. In 2024, the new right Tories pushed for a hard-line stance on immigration, including calls to leave the ECHR, which went down poorly with one nation factions in the party, representing several blue wall constituencies with a more liberal view of social and moral issues such as multiculturalism. Trust on the economy is critical. Parties presiding over high inflation will always be punished. Despite an improving picture under Sennach, the Tories were blamed for the mini-budget in 2022 that cut taxes for the wealthy without a plan to plug the gaps in the public finances, leading to market jitters and Bank of England intervention. The rising high interest rates which followed were also blamed on the party in power. Likewise, the political shenanigans of Boris Johnson's tenure, his fragrant disregard for his own Covid rules and failure to admit that he had lied to Parliament tarred all Tories with the same brush of untrustworthiness. Meanwhile, Labour had moved to the centre under Keir Starmer, neither loved but not loathed any more. They became a palatable alternative to a divided, incompetent, tired and untrusted Conservative party. Thus, valence was massive in 2024 and arguably always has been a major factor in determining electoral outcomes, more so than social factors. After the music, let's consider other non-social factors like the campaign, like manifestos, like the media. So we have shown in the previous section that short term factors like trust in a government and, like specific issues, can drive voting behaviour more than these long term demographic factors. There are still those, though, who mistakenly claim that non-social factors such as the media, the campaign and by extension the party manifestos, all things that happen pretty near an election, are inconsequential, especially when compared to long term social and demographic factors. They would point to print media circulation, which has been declining. The circulation of the sun fell to an estimated 700,000 in 2024, down from over 3 million in 2010. Thus, its decision to switch support from the Tories to Labour in 2024 had arguably only a minimal impact compared to when it switched sides in 1997. TV debates have rarely moved the dial. The 2024 debates highlighted Starmer's difficulty against the more aggressive Sunak, but they were ultimately pretty forgettable affairs. After the 2010 leaders' debates, the Liberal Democrats only increased their share of the vote by 1% and actually lost seats in the election compared to 2005, despite Nick Clegg, the then party leader, performing exceedingly well. You could also make the argument that social media and its influence has been overhyped, the echoed chamber of social media results in voters receiving posts and tweets that reflect rather than change their minds. In so far as it does matter, social media is a useful tool to reach out to different demographic groups, so the argument goes. UKIP reached out to elderly voters on Facebook in 2015 and spent much of its campaign money on a social media campaign to win them over. In 2024, Farage's Reform Party UK attempted to win over young male voters, with Farage appearing on podcasts aimed at young men and creating videos showing him mouthing M&M lyrics. His TikTok posts garnered more interactions per video than Jeremy Corbyn, Labour's Zara Salterna and the Greens' Carla Deña. These examples show perhaps that long-term demographics matter the most and that short-term media strategy is simply a manifestation of this fact. It is a tool by which you reach out to those demographic groups. Moreover, manifestos and campaigns have arguably had minimal effects on election campaigns. Labour's landslide in 2024 was predicted before the campaign got going and it duly occurred. Its manifesto contained no surprises, either to the party's benefit or to its detriment. These examples suggest that election outcomes are largely decided long beforehand and thus social and demographic factors largely fix the result. Indeed, media campaigns are often shaped by those demographic factors. Yet all of this, all of it, is too simplistic. Manifestos can matter. The Tory plan to tax house owners to pay for social care dubbed the dementia tax seriously backfired in 2017. Along with Labour's well-received manifesto in that same election which pledged to scrap tuition fees, the two major party manifestos arguably cost Theresa May her majority. Sunak's surprising announcement on national service in 2024 was largely laughed at. It gave the impression of a man desperate for any mud to stick. Campaigns do matter. The Conservatives ran a more traditional made for TV campaign in 2019, which involved Boris Johnson taking part in a number of publicity stunts, including driving a JCB emblazoned with get Brexit done through a wall-marked gridlock. Labour used social media far more effectively than the Conservatives in the 2017 election, with the 'Daddy, why do you hate me' videos, search that out on YouTube by the way, and grind for Corbyn going viral. Likewise in 2024, Labour smartly utilised their digital ad spend on TikTok ads before the campaign officially got underway, which meant that they were not subject to campaign spending restrictions. The press still matters. The sun's turn out, the light headline helped defeat Kinnock and Labour in 1992. But I said the press still matters, so let's fast forward to today. Revelations of parties in Downing Street during lockdown, broken by the Daily Mirror's Pippa Carrera, seriously damaged the Tories. TV matters and still matters. Trust damaged the Tories in part because she simply came across as weird and lacking in any kind of communication skill on TV. She looked like a rabbit in headlights after the Queen died just days into her short premiership. How you come across on TV really does matter. It's important as Corbyn's car crash interview with Andrew Neil attests to. The former Labour leader just couldn't bring himself to apologise over allegations of anti-Semitism in his party in that 2019 campaign. Thus media image, campaign botches, manifesto malfunctions and the like cut across long term issues regarding class, age and more. Thus long term social factors are not a significant determinant of voting behaviour as short term ones. Firstly, some demographic factors are simply less important than others. Age seems significant, but does gender, does class? Secondly, valence issues, trust in a leader, a party and its economic competence or lack thereof has determined the results of every election in my lifetime and certainly yours. Otherwise, you'd have Corbyn as PM in 2019 and Sunak, or dare I say trust in 2024. Finally, the media in all its changing formats, the campaign and manifestos all play significant roles at least at one or several elections at a time and far more so than demography. People move, they get older, their income levels change, thus no one individual has the same demography throughout their lives. The changes to their lives affects how they vote and their immediate circumstances and their immediate perceptions of politics are far more powerful determinants of what they do in the voting booth. Okay, so that's it for today. Thanks for listening, peeps. Remember to think about asking for a plus plus plus subscription for Christmas. It will be a wonderful thing to receive under the tree. Until next time, bye bye.