Politics On The Canvas(s)

The first question that everybody was asking themselves after the general election result came through was why the turnout was so low. There has been plenty of discussion of the question since, culminating last week in the publication of the Electoral Commission's first report on the election, which among other sources draws on two MORI surveys for the Commission. [Attitudes to Voting and the Political Process]

A good many factors which may have contributed to a low turnout have been widely discussed, including general disengagement from the political system, especially among the young, the feeling that this was a boring election or that the result was a foregone conclusion, that the party leaders and their programmes were uninspiring, and so on. But very little attention has been paid to how effectively the parties put their case across on the ground in the traditional way, canvassing and leafletting.

In each of the past six elections, we have asked the public towards the end of the campaign about the various ways in which they might have been in contact with the campaign - have they seen the party broadcasts or the advertisements, been canvassed in person or had a leaflet through the door, been to a meeting where a candidate spoke or actively helped in a campaign. We found, as you might expect if the public was simply bored or unreceptive, that there had been a sharp drop in the number that watched the party election broadcasts, from 73% last time (and an 83% peak in 1983, which was the last election that was considered such a "foregone conclusion".) to 58% this time. (There was no corresponding drop in the figures for election broadcasts on the radio, but this may simply reflect radio's growing audience share.)

It was interesting to note, also, that the impact of poster advertising on billboards was considerably less than 1997, only 50% of the public having seen them as opposed to 70% four years ago. The fall was not simply in the overall figures, but was similar for both the main parties when we asked which party or parties' posters had been seen - 31% thought they had seen a Tory poster (53% in 1997), and 35% a Labour poster (55%). It takes a second look at the data to realise what this implies for voters having seen more than one party's posters. In 1997, three-quarters of those who had seen any poster had seen a Labour one, and three-quarters of them had also seen a Conservative one; in 2001, not only had fewer seen posters at all, but only seven in ten of those had seen a Labour poster and barely three in five a Conservative one.