Referendum turnout a false friend in campaign to engage electorate

A column for outside contributors. Contact: agenda@theherald.co.uk

VOTER turnout has been falling in elections for a number of years. The problem is worst in the less well-off sections of the electorate. But last September’s referendum on Scottish independence made the world sit up and take notice. It bucked the downward trend, producing an 84.6 per cent turnout, well above the 66 per cent in the previous two UK elections.

Scotland still appeared to be feeling this “referendum effect” at the General Election. The 71.1 per cent turnout was an increase of 7.3 points on 2010, compared to a one-point increase elsewhere in the UK.

For politicians and political scientists looking to revitalise longterm declines in voter turnout across the board, a view has developed that Scotland might point to an answer, particularly for deprived communities. So we decided to look more closely at voter behaviour in Scotland during different recent elections to see if this interpretation was correct.

We focused on Glasgow, since nowhere in Scotland has voter disengagement been more evident than in its biggest city. It has become politically disengaged, lagging Scottish turnout in every vote since 1945. Low political engagement along with Glasgow’s other woes tends to be linked to poverty. Glasgow has the lion’s share of Scotland’s poverty. It has 11.4 per cent of the Scottish population, but three times that share of the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

In elections for the Scottish Parliament, Glasgow turnout has been eight to 10 percentage points lower than the Scottish average. Even in the referendum, Glasgow’s 75 per cent turnout was the lowest in Scotland. We obtained from detailed voting information for Glasgow City Council’s 240 polling districts for the 2011 Scottish election, the referendum and this year’s UK election. For each polling district, we used the Scottish deprivation statistics to give them a score for average deprivation.

What we found was very interesting. At the 2011 Scottish election, a district’s deprivation score made a big difference to voter turnout. Deprivation explained 54 per cent of the variation in voting across Glasgow between different districts. At the 2014 referendum the relationship with deprivation became much weaker, explaining only 27 per cent of the variation. The usual link between turnout and deprivation was strongly undermined by the referendum.

Yet in the General Election, Glasgow reverted to type. Deprivation became a very good predictor of turnout once again, explaining 50 per cent of the voting variation between districts.

This suggests that the turnout drives in Glasgow’s deprived communities during the referendum by the likes of the Radical Independence Campaign were successful. But this “referendum effect” looks to have been temporary. When voters from deprived communities were asked at this year’s election to vote again for politicians and parties, as opposed to the question of independence, they were no more likely to do so than in 2011.

We can only speculate about why more deprived voters were more inclined to vote in 2014. It suggests they turned out to address a meaningful substantive issue rather than the election of politicians. Possibly there was an element of “what have we got to lose?”

As a leading analysis of the Scottish referendum vote has highlighted, those more inclined to vote to Yes were in the lowest income quartile (56.4 per cent), working class (53.6 per cent) and in social rented housing (61.9 per cent). Compare this with the overall vote in favour of 45 per cent).

Yes Scotland tapped into – and, to a degree – fuelled, disenchantment with Westminster rule and austerity policies. Independence was projected as an opportunity to break the mould of “normal” British politics and create a more socialdemocratic style of polity.

Perhaps for the same reasons, last week’s Greek referendum highlighted that the Athens poor were far more inclined to take a chance with their political future than the more affluent communities in the Greek capital.

But our Scottish analysis suggests that such mould-breaking decisions don’t re-engage more deprived voters permanently. Contrary to what the initial headline figures for Scottish turnout at the 2015 UK election suggested, in deprived areas the legacy of the referendum appears to have evaporated very quickly.

Those looking for ways to replicate Scotland’s referendum turnout boost for deprived communities in their neck of the woods seem to be relying on a false friend. It would appear that the “referendum effect” was a fleeting one, rather than a durable legacy. Sorry to be the bearers of bad news. Neil McGarvey is a senior fellow and Heinz Brandenburg is a senior lecturer in politics, both at the University of Strathclyde.