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Voting behaviour essay

Hi everybody

I'm struggling with a piece of work about how long term and short term factors influence voting behaviour. does anyone have an example high mark essay or can give me some ideas about what to write and how to get high marks on thus question?

Reply 1

ttennitt

Hmm,
long term and short term factors are harder than other factors (social and non-social). maybe for short term - age is good one to talk about, and long term ethnicity and gender, although these aren't as strong. class could fit into both but maybe do that for long term?
remember to include election case studies and statistics - the more relevant the better.
what exam board do you do? i can help with edexcel as I've just done a question on voting behaviour in my end of year 12 exam :smile:

Reply 2

Ad204rom

I have Edexcel too :smile:

I have mine coming up in a few days so I’m just going over the possible topics and I have a feeling voting behaviour is going to come up. What talking points did you have in regards to factors affecting voting behaviour? Im thinking of current issues like how in 2005 the muslim vote swayed away from labour bc of the Iraq war, but other than that I don’t feel I could stretch out my other points into big paragraphs

Reply 3

ttennitt

Original post by Ad204rom

I have Edexcel too :smile:

there's the obvious social factors, age wasn't important in 1997 when Blair won the most votes in all age categories except 65+ but was important in 2019, then class and i think that the 2010 election is an example of this but I'm not sure. region links well to class, and gender is only really significant in 1979 when more women voted Tory than men mainly because of Thatcher. there's lots of recent examples that go against these factors, the 2019 Brexit election went against class based voting and region based voting (there's definitely some stats on this online).
other than there is valence issues, eg 1979 after the winter of discontent the people didn't trust Labour to handle the economy and then in 2019 for party leader influence Corbyn was disliked by the public and didn't have as decisive a message as Johnson. issue voting is key in 2019 with Brexit, and i don't usually mention rational choice as there's less of a strong argument for it but you could talk about class here with taxation.
hope that helps!