First, a brief message to all those affected by the events in London this week-end. Our thoughts are with you.
When it comes to age in elections, we often hear that older people tend to vote more. One question that poses itself is: “What would happen if more young people voted ?”.
I am not answering this question in my post – there is a more in-depth piece of work coming. But I am trying to set the scene for the investigation.
First element: Is it true that older people vote more ?
According to the FT, it is:
A very worrying factor in the above article is that the turnout in age group 18-24 has collapsed since 2010, with participation at 30% in the EU referendum.
The turnout for other age groups rises steeply with the age 65+ achieving 80% turnout.
You often hear millennials blaming baby-boomers for the state of the world ( I know mine do). But the very poor turnout shows that young Britons have surrendered the control over their future to voters in late middle-age and above, who are shaping the decisions taken by government.
Second Element: Does age influence your voting decision ?
According to YouGov, it does:
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/04/25/demographics-dividing-britain/
The article states strong tendencies for younger people to vote Labour, with older people voting Conservative. The crossover point is around age 34 – before, more Labour voters, after, more Conservative.
If you look at a political map of the UK, it’s pretty blue all the way, with a concentration of red in the cities. Curiously enough, there are more young people in the cities than there are in the countryside.
So as a young person, you will not be able to shape your future until you and your age group go out and vote.
How can we attempt to verify this ?
We have to go to work on the data.
I am going to use the FT data as an anchor point and assume that the data is correct. I will then model, based on population estimates, the likely number of votes per LSOA that would go either to Labour or the Conservatives. All being well, I should be in a position to tune, in the data or interactively, the turnout for a given age group, or their voting intentions. Finally, I will compare that with the 2015 election results and see whether my investigations confirm or deny YouGov’s assertion, and what youth turnout it would take to change the result.
(Commercial Message)
I will, of course, be using MicroStrategy’s peerless data wrangling and exploration capabilities. I plan to use 10.4 initially, migrating to 10.7 for sharing and map layering.
A Blog about Data 