Under Giulia's leadership, the aim is to enhance and broaden the reach of the existing Behavioural Science capabilities within Public Affairs in the UK.
Question: The Lib Dems have been polling around 25 per cent consistently for the past year and closely challenging for or winning in by-elections. How well do you think they can do in the general election?
The Labour Party at the 1997 general election was rewarded with the biggest landslide since the War. 419 Labour MPs took their seats in the House of Commons across from just 165 Tories and 46 Liberal Democrats and 29 others including 19 from Northern Ireland, an overall majority of 179. Labour won, going away, with a 44 percent share of the vote to the Conservatives' 32 percent and the Liberal Democrats' 17 percent.
The decline of turnout in British elections in the last few years has created something approaching a panic in the political establishment and has left the Electoral Commission and other interested bodies with an acute problem in political marketing. What has resulted is both the commissioning of research to explore the reasons for non-voting and a rash of suggested solutions. This paper discusses newly-published evidence about the way the public views voting and how this is related to other attitudinal and behavioural characteristics commonly treated collectively as components of "activism" or "good citizenship". It also considers the implications of these and other findings for some of the suggested solutions to the turnout problem.
Michael Howard is struggling to make his mark with the electorate. But failing, so far, to engage floating voters. The election is likely to be called next April, just nine months away, for a 5th May election day.
Eight in 10 (80%) of the adult British population say they are in favour of ID cards, and slightly more (83%) say they would be happy to carry the card at all times — according to a MORI survey carried out for specialist IT consultancy Detica [note 1].
Received political wisdom is that modern governments, especially the present British government, are and will be judged by the public on whether they have "delivered". So "Has New Labour delivered?" will, it is suggested, be the key question on which the outcome of the next general election may turn (assuming, of course, that the opposition has regained a sufficient degree of political credibility for anybody to take them seriously as an alternative). Sir Robert Worcester analyses.
One year to go until the next General Election. May 5, 2005, is my odds-on bet for the date of the next election, which given the rules, it is likely to be called on Thursday, 7 April. There are two other anniversaries that have been celebrated (?) in the past few days: Tony Blair's 7th year in office, and the invasion of Iraq a year ago.
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!
