Southampton academics Patrick Sturgis, Professor of Research Methodology and Director of the National Centre for Research Methods, and Will Jennings, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at our University have written a guest blog post for the London School of Economics (LSE) on the subject of the 2017 general election and the concept of the ‘youthquake’.
The term ‘youthquake’ refers to the surge of support that Labour received from the youth vote in the general election. Whilst the British Election Study (BES) team queried whether more young people did turn out to vote, Patrick and Will have used the latest data from the Understanding Society survey to argue that there was, in fact, a significant increase in turnout for the under 30s.
Understanding Society is a longitudinal household panel survey, which interviews a random sample of the UK population annually on a range of different topics, including voting and party support. A key feature is its very large sample size (around 40,000 respondents at Wave 8).
Patrick and Will found that there was an eight percentage point increase in turnout from voters aged 18-24, and a 13 percentage point increase in turnout for 25-29 year-olds, supporting the theory that 2017 witnessed somewhat of a ‘youthquake’ after all.
You can read the full blog post here.
