Could younger voters make a difference?

Russell Brand famously declared that he doesn’t vote and urged others to do the same. However a few days before the election, faced with the prospect of a Conservative majority he changed his mind and urged voters to choose Labour. Would it have made a difference if the sort of voters that may be influenced by Russell Brand had in fact voted labour?

Historical trends in voter turnout.

The first aspect to look at is turnout.

Some data on historical turnout in the UK can be obtained from here.

http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?CountryCode=GB

The dramatic and permanent fall in turnout took place after Tony Blair was elected. Since that time far fewer people seem to be bothered to vote.

The key point here is that turnout has not really increased since the last election, as some comentators have said. Turnout was higher than previously in Scotland, so these figures for the entire UK include this effect. So turnout of the voting age population in England has in fact fallen. Not only that, but there is a notable increase in the number of people who are not registered to vote, as the increased gap between turnout of voters and turnout of voting age population shows. There are various reasons for this, including the fact that immigrants cannot vote in national elections. It does suggest that young people reaching voting age are not registering to vote. People who move around the country to take new jobs are also less likely to be registered to vote. SUch people tend to be young.

Some data on the historical relationship between age and turnout can be obtained from a data tables in various government report. Interestingly more younger people voted in the 60s than today. The big decline in turnout after Blair did not affect older voters much. It is not just young voters in the 18-24 age range that are disillusioned, under forties are much less likely to vote that over sixties..

Evidence of the age effect on turnout

The ONS (office of national statistics), provides a full breakdown of the number of people in each year class for each constituency.

Russell Brand is just turning 40, so in order to produce an age index for each constituency I grouped the data into under 40s (Russell Brand generation) and over 40s. I then calculated the percent of “older” people in each constituency in order to look at whether there was any consistent trend in turnout as a function of the age of the voting population. I used data for England and Wales without Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The results are very clear.

Note that this is not just the turnout of registered voters, which is most often reported. It is the percentage of the population that were old enough to vote that did in fact cast a vote. This is staggeringly low in some constituencies. They are all those with a high proportion of younger voters in the “Russell Brand” generation. A trend is very clear.

Evidence of the age effect on votes for Labour

Conservatives do very well in constituencies with a large proportion of older voters. Labour tend to win in constituencies with more younger voters. The conservatives only won in eight constituencies with a majority of voters under 40. Labour only won four constituencies with over 70% of the population over 40.

What would have happened if younger voters had turned out to vote labour?

It might be argued that if older voters are in the majority there is little point in voting if you are young. However the reverse could be true. The overall proportion of under 40s registered to vote and in fact voting is around 55%. There are therefore a large number of potential voters that labour could reach by inspiring them. In contrast a large proportion of potential conservative voters do in fact already vote. Although Labour cannot hope to win seats with a large proportion of older voters, getting the vote out where under 40s make up between 40 and 60% of the total voters could make a big difference.

I simulated a situation in which 20% of the under 40s in each constituency added their votes to labour (excluding Scotland).

So if 20% of the Russell Brand generation had in fact taken his final advice and gone out and voted labour, labour would have won a clear majority. Incidentally the total number involved would be around 3.5 million votes, which is just over the number of followers on Russell Brand’s facebook page.