The professor will see you now - voting and campaigning
4 min read
In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. Here: changes in voting and campaigning
One of the biggest, and yet often unremarked, changes in British elections over the last 20 years has been the rise in postal voting. Before the turn of the century fewer than three per cent of voters cast their ballot by post. Since the Representation of the People Act 2000 liberalised the rules the numbers have increased dramatically and in the last three elections postal votes accounted for more than a fifth of those cast. We no longer have polling day, we have polling days, with many voters casting their ballots weeks before the end of the campaign.
Given that anyone can get one now, those voting by post could be a perfectly representative sample of the population. They are not. Some recently published research shows that four things seem to be especially important. Compare the over 75s to those aged 18-24, and the former are more than 20 percentage points more likely to be voting by post. Those with a disability that significantly limits their day-to-day activities are 13 percentage points more likely to vote by post than the non-disabled. (There is obviously some overlap between these two groups, but these figures are the independent effect on the likelihood of voting by post). Where the costs of voting are higher, so is the likelihood of postal voting.
On the other hand, those with high levels of partisanship are less likely to vote by post – by a more modest three percentage points or so. Partisans still get a kick out of the expressive act of voting publicly.
The fourth important variable was constituency marginality. Voters in marginal seats might anyway be more likely to opt for a postal vote, but we also know that parties campaign more in those seats – and those campaigns focus on signing supporters up for postal votes, because they are more likely to be returned. In 2019 of the more than eight million postal ballots issued, 84 per cent were returned.
For this, political parties need boots on the ground.
Political parties have long been made up of real enthusiasts, out proselytising in all weathers, and those whose campaigning is mostly done from a sedentary position. It always comes as a surprise to some observers of politics to find out quite many party members do very little or no campaigning. As another piece of recently published research showed in the 2015 campaign fewer than 45 per cent of Conservative or Labour members delivered any leaflets.
Increasingly parties are supplementing members’ activity with party supporters, those who are not members but who feel a very strong affiliation. This is what political scientists call the ‘multi-speed membership party’.
Unsurprisingly, each individual supporter is less likely to campaign than any member, but there are just a lot more of the former. In 2015, for example, there were roughly 40 times more people who said they felt very strongly Conservative than there were Conservative party members.
Based on the figures in the research, you can calculate that in 2015 both Labour and the Conservatives had more non-members delivering leaflets for them than they did members.
We need to be a bit careful here. These sort of estimates come with large potential errors. Plus, just because more supporters delivered leaflets than members doesn’t mean supporters delivered more leaflets. It could be that each member delivered multiple loads, whereas previously keen supporters did one batch, realised it was boring, and went home to watch EastEnders instead. (I know I would).
But still, the broad direction is clear. Those boots on the ground in election campaigns may well not belong to members any more.
Your further reading for this week:
J Townsley et al, Who Votes by Post? Understanding the Drivers of Postal Voting in the 2019 British General Election, Parliamentary Affairs (2023); P Webb et al, So who really does the donkey work in multi-speed membership parties? Comparing the election campaign activity of party members and party supporters, Electoral Studies (2017).
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