A Majority Of Over 100 With The Women's Vote? Or, No Overall Majority?

Dr Elizabeth Nelson, the founding partner of Taylor Nelson, now one of the world's largest market research groups, leads the London arm of the International Women's Forum, and asked me recently to have a look at the upcoming elections in the USA and here in Britain. I'll confess, I hadn't been paying enough attention to what's been happening to the women's voting intentions since the last general election. Mea culpa!

What I discovered completely overturns the common wisdom about how the women's vote is traditionally biased to the Conservatives, a long held understanding going back to when women first had the vote. When I first became involved in political polling in the early '70s, I discovered that about half of the advantage the Tories enjoyed from the women's vote came from women living longer, and the well-known tendency of older people to favour the Tories.

However, these shibboleths are now clearly out of date. For some seven elections, with a curious but to my knowledge unexplained blip in the 1987 general election, there has been a steady decline in the benefit that the women's vote gives to the Conservatives. This is something that Roger Mortimore and I have devoted some analysis to in our books following the last two elections, Explaining Labour's Landslide (Politico's, 1999) and Explaining Labour's Second Landslide (Politico's, 2001), but to see now what's happened to it has gone largely unnoticed and little commented upon.

So let's address this phenomenon. First, the 'Gender Gap', shown in the first graphic which indicates that when Harold Wilson won his narrow victory in the second, October, general election in 1974, he was sailing against a strong wind, with women no less than a 12% bias to Edward Heath's Conservatives. Latterly, there has been only a very marginal bias, which now seems to have swung the other way. Younger women have been substantially more likely to vote Labour than men their age, going back some years. In the two Blair elections, this has been the case with a vengeance.

Gender Gap

Conservative lead over Labour among women minus Conservative lead over Labour among men

Base: c.2,000 British/UK adults

Gender Gap -- by age

Source: Explaining Labour's Second Landslide

So what's the picture now? Let's look first at the key factor of turnout. If as most of the pollsters did before 1997, we just look at the total electorate who express a voting intention and do not voluntarily say they do not intend to vote, the March MORI omnibus figures (excluding the 11% who are undecided even after prompting how they intend to vote at the next election, the 13% who say they will not vote, and the 1% who say it is none of our business how they intend to vote) we get an eight point Labour lead, enough to return them to office with a majority of well over 200 seats margin over all other parties.

But for several years, we've been asking a 'certainty of voting' measure, rating their voting intention on a points out of ten scale, with 10 being 'absolutely certain' to vote. For several years, since the 2001 election, those 'certain' that they will vote has ranged around the 50% mark (see Vox Pop, December 2003). Then a very different picture emerges. On this basis, the Government and Opposition are usually only separated by a few points, and this month are level pegging.

This 35% parity between the major parties with the Liberal Democrats at a credible 23% projects to a substantial majority for Labour, in the order of 65 seats over all other parties. The analysis by gender shows some important psephological effects. First, that the 'absolute' turnout measure shows that a higher percentage of women say they are absolutely certain to vote that men, if by a small margin. Second, that among women, Labour holds at 35%, while the Conservatives slip to just 32%, as a result of a greater level of support among women for the Liberal Democrats. This would, all other things being equal, give not a 65 seat majority, but of over 100! While if only men voted, there would on these figures result in a hung Parliament!

Voting Intention (March 2004)

Q How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?

Base: 1,900 British adults 18+, 12-16 February 2004 (Excludes 11% undecided, 13% would not vote, 1% refused)

Voting Intention -- Majority of 65

Q How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?

Base: 1,900 British adults 18+, 12-16 February 2004 (Excludes 11% undecided, 13% would not vote, 1% refused)

Voting Intention -- or no overall majority?

Q How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?

Base: 1,900 British adults 18+, 12-16 February 2004 (Excludes 11% undecided, 13% would not vote, 1% refused)

The Ipsos Government Delivery Index

Each quarter for the past several years, MORI's Social Research Institute has looked at the public's expectations of the Government's delivery on the key issues facing the country. This latest, carried out last month, is the ninth in the series.

The Delivery Index focuses on expectations for public services and the economy generally as well as on the five key public service areas -- education, the NHS, public transport, policing, and the environment. It is MORI SRI's intention to conduct regular tracking of public attitudes on these questions up to the general election.

Looking back over the past year, two concerns, education and policing, have continued to show a measure of public confidence that things will get better, while there is increasing concern that the government is not meeting its obligations to improve the environment. On the other hand, both the NHS and public transport are looking up, in the eyes of the electorate.

Delivery in 2003-2004

Q Thinking about... over the next few years, do you expect it to get better/worse?

Base: c970 British adults Source: MORI Social Research Institute Delivery Index

The Budget

The Chancellor has done it again. The most popular Chancellor since Denis Healey, this latest budget went down reasonably well, seen as on balance good for the country as a whole, if not so well for themselves.

The Budget

Q Do you think the Budget proposals are a good thing or a bad thing (a) for you personally? (b) for the country as a whole?

Base: 831 British adults, 19-23 March 2004 Source: MORI Social Research Institute Delivery Index

Key Political Findings

Source: MORI

Robert Worcester is Chairman of MORI and Visiting Professor of Government at LSE