Votes At 16?

This week, the Electoral Commission announced that it was beginning consultations on whether the minimum voting age in Britain should be reduced. By coincidence, this week also saw the release of a MORI survey for Nestlй UK (published as the Nestlй Family Monitor Number 16: Young People's Attitudes Towards Politics): this survey of school pupils aged 11-18 in England and Wales included questions both on attitudes to reducing the voting age and on how young people would vote if they were old enough. Sam Younger (the Chairman of the Electoral Commission) and Yvette Cooper MP (the minister responsible for electoral arrangements) were among the speakers at a Smith Institute Seminar at 11 Downing Street where the report was launched. The findings will, we hope, help to inform the debate.

Perhaps the most obvious question is, what do the young people themselves think about the voting age?

Most young people say the voting age should be lowered, with 16 being the most popular option: three in five feel the voting age should be reduced, with 53% wanting it at 16 or below. Only a quarter would keep it at 18 (25%).

Among those who are already 17 or over, though, there is less enthusiasm. Attitudes to the correct voting age are very much dependent on respondents' own ages - those who are younger and will have longer to wait before they can vote are keener to see the voting age reduced. Among those who are already 17 or over, more than half feel the voting age should remain 18, while only 32% would reduce it; among 11 and 12 year olds, only 14% would leave the voting age at 18, while 69% would reduce it, and indeed 8% would like votes at 11. The average age chosen as ideal rises from fifteen-and-a-half by the youngest age group to seventeen-and-a-half among 17 and 18 year olds. It may be that there is a direct element of self-interest in these attitudes, or at least a feeling among the younger pupils that they are being unduly deprived of the chance to vote; but it may also be that the older pupils, remembering their own opinions and knowledge when they were younger now feel that it was right that they should not have had the vote then - whatever they may have thought at the time!

(It should perhaps be mentioned that the survey was only of school pupils, so those who left school at 16 are not included in the survey universe for the oldest group. But there seems no obvious reason why this should have affected the results to this question too dramatically.)

If the vote were to be extended to 16 year olds, how would they use it? Indeed, would they do so at all? The Nestlй survey measured both voting intention and likelihood of voting but here the exclusion of early school leavers would be likely to have more effect on the figures, and we are safer relying on data from the regular MORI Political Monitor surveys on the MORI Omnibus, which interviews 16-17 year olds although their voting intention responses are of course not included in the published voting intention figures, which are confined to those aged 18+. (The MORI Omnibus also covers all of Great Britain, whereas the Nestlй Monitor excludes Scotland, so the Omnibus figures are more easily comparable with other national data.) In the 12 surveys conducted in the first half of 2003, we interviewed a total of 838 young people aged 16-17, but of those only 54% named a party that they would vote for in a general election if they were old enough. Those who did split 60% to Labour, 18% Conservative and 15% Liberal Democrat, with 7% backing smaller parties.

These party support figures are a little more pro-government than the responses of 18-24 year olds in the same surveys (54% Labour), but not startlingly so. The 18-24 year olds, though, are considerably more likely to name a party at all . Among 18-24 year olds, 21% say they would not vote and 14% are undecided how they would vote; of the younger group, 19% would not vote, but 27% are undecided, almost double the number of 18-24 year olds.

Of course, we mustn't forget that these responses are partly conditioned by the existing system. Since 16 and 17 year olds can't vote at the moment, it is perhaps not surprising that a substantial number haven't decided how they would if they could. It may well be that reducing the voting age to 16 would encourage the young to consider these matters at an earlier age, and that they would be just as ready to exercise their franchise were they given the chance as are first-time voters at the moment.

But there is more to it than the ability to pick a favourite party. We know that many of those (of all ages) who give a voting intention do not in the event turn out to vote, and that this problem has got far worse in recent years. At the last general election, 59% of the public voted; and MORI's estimate is that only 39% of 18-24 year olds did so. Consequently, we also ask our respondents on some surveys how likely, on a scale of 1 to 10, they would be to vote in a general election. In our Omnibus survey at the end of March (when the Nestlй survey was beginning), 50% of the public were absolutely certain (10/10) that they would vote, and 63% said 8/10 or more, the nearest to last time's 59% turnout. If we therefore take 8/10 as the best guess of the current responses of those who will eventually vote, we would get only a 38% projected turnout in the same survey from 18-24 year olds, lower than last time. And in the Nestlй survey, 28% of all the pupils but 39% of those aged 16 and over declared the same level of certainty. As already noted, the exclusion of early school leavers will have increased the political enthusiasm of the sample but, on the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that there would be some increase in commitment if the right to vote was real and not merely hypothetical - to start with, at least, if only from the novelty of it. So it is probably not too unreasonable to estimate that turnout among 16-17 year olds might be similar to that among 18-24 year olds. Those who have been airily suggesting that votes at 16 would raise turnout, however, are talking through their hats; they will not get a 59% turnout of 16-17 year olds, let alone higher!

For just a bit of fun, as Peter Snow would say: Assuming they were allowed to vote and did so as this survey suggests, what would it mean? There are roughly one and a half million 16 and 17 year olds in Great Britain; with a 39% turnout, that means around 600,000 extra votes: 360,000 for Labour, 108,000 for the Tories. Just under 400 onto Labour's majority over the Conservatives per constituency, probably not enough to swing a single seat. So not exactly a political revolution.

But that assumes that nothing would be changed by the very process of giving them the vote. That is perhaps an unsafe assumption. At any rate, food for thought.

Technical details

MORI conducted classroom based self-completion sessions with 914 young people between the ages of 11 and 18 in 33 schools and colleges across England and Wales for the Nestlй Family Monitor, between 3 March - 22 May 2003.

'Young People's Attitudes Towards Politics' is the sixteenth issue of the Nestlй Family Monitor, a series of research studies examining different aspects of family life in Britain today. Past issues available at: www.nestlefamilymonitor.co.uk