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| I knew that many people don’t vote. I should have asked why | I knew that many people don’t vote. I should have asked why |
| (25 days later) | |
| The clue was in the question. “What about the nonvoters?” Since elections are settled by the people who show up, the impact of those who don’t is likely to be small. There’s a reason they’re called nonvoters. It isn’t easy to disentangle the motives of people whose only known common trait is reluctance to express a preference. Pollsters find them as hard to fathom as politicians do – and politicians have vested interests in interpreting silence as consent. | The clue was in the question. “What about the nonvoters?” Since elections are settled by the people who show up, the impact of those who don’t is likely to be small. There’s a reason they’re called nonvoters. It isn’t easy to disentangle the motives of people whose only known common trait is reluctance to express a preference. Pollsters find them as hard to fathom as politicians do – and politicians have vested interests in interpreting silence as consent. |
| There is also a difference between refusing to vote because you care about politics but think the system cannot represent you, and not bothering because you are uninterested in the whole voting business. Alienation and apathy are not quite the same thing. But they are alike in expressing fatalism about politics – that it is all settled elsewhere, by other people. My biggest regret as a commentator is complicity with that fatalism. I knew that turnout had declined through the second half of the 20th century, and saw that it was a problem. But I did not interrogate its causes. I was insufficiently curious about nonvoters – until they defied the label and voted. | There is also a difference between refusing to vote because you care about politics but think the system cannot represent you, and not bothering because you are uninterested in the whole voting business. Alienation and apathy are not quite the same thing. But they are alike in expressing fatalism about politics – that it is all settled elsewhere, by other people. My biggest regret as a commentator is complicity with that fatalism. I knew that turnout had declined through the second half of the 20th century, and saw that it was a problem. But I did not interrogate its causes. I was insufficiently curious about nonvoters – until they defied the label and voted. |
| In the weeks running up to the EU referendum, MPs started reporting mini-surges of Brexit feeling on streets and estates they had written off as deserts of political disengagement. On the day itself, people arrived at polling booths, having never visited one before, unfamiliar with the process, asking officials: “How do I vote leave?” | In the weeks running up to the EU referendum, MPs started reporting mini-surges of Brexit feeling on streets and estates they had written off as deserts of political disengagement. On the day itself, people arrived at polling booths, having never visited one before, unfamiliar with the process, asking officials: “How do I vote leave?” |
| Turnout in that poll was 72%. In the general election the previous year, it had been 66%. In Scotland’s 2014 independence ballot it was 84% – a return to levels of participation not seen in the UK since the 1950s. An obvious reason why referendums might be more magnetic to voters is the starkness of the choice. When the proposition on the ballot paper is unmistakably drastic and binary, people are more motivated to take a view. | Turnout in that poll was 72%. In the general election the previous year, it had been 66%. In Scotland’s 2014 independence ballot it was 84% – a return to levels of participation not seen in the UK since the 1950s. An obvious reason why referendums might be more magnetic to voters is the starkness of the choice. When the proposition on the ballot paper is unmistakably drastic and binary, people are more motivated to take a view. |
| This was borne out in the smaller, rarefied arena of Labour’s 2015 leadership contest. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters correctly understood that his candidacy represented a total rupture from the party’s past. The horror expressed by Corbyn’s rivals at that prospect accelerated his victory by advertising that the alternatives amounted to desultory acceptance of the status quo. The same dynamic clearly contributed to Labour’s defiance of electoral doom-prophecy in June this year. Turnout among voters aged 18 to 24 – previously the most stubborn abstainers – rose to its highest general election level in 25 years. And not to the benefit of the Tories. | This was borne out in the smaller, rarefied arena of Labour’s 2015 leadership contest. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters correctly understood that his candidacy represented a total rupture from the party’s past. The horror expressed by Corbyn’s rivals at that prospect accelerated his victory by advertising that the alternatives amounted to desultory acceptance of the status quo. The same dynamic clearly contributed to Labour’s defiance of electoral doom-prophecy in June this year. Turnout among voters aged 18 to 24 – previously the most stubborn abstainers – rose to its highest general election level in 25 years. And not to the benefit of the Tories. |
| I was slow to grasp how epidemic feelings of voicelessness had become | I was slow to grasp how epidemic feelings of voicelessness had become |
| Brexit, Scottish independence and Corbynism appeal to very diverse groups of people, including many who would never skip so much as a council byelection. But there was a common thread to those campaigns: the targeted offer of agency to people who felt that they had no purchase on the political process, that power had been withheld and hoarded by others. It is the message ingeniously condensed in the Brexiteer slogan: “Take back control.” As a newspaper columnist with an amplified voice in political debate, I was slow to grasp how epidemic those feelings of voicelessness had become. | Brexit, Scottish independence and Corbynism appeal to very diverse groups of people, including many who would never skip so much as a council byelection. But there was a common thread to those campaigns: the targeted offer of agency to people who felt that they had no purchase on the political process, that power had been withheld and hoarded by others. It is the message ingeniously condensed in the Brexiteer slogan: “Take back control.” As a newspaper columnist with an amplified voice in political debate, I was slow to grasp how epidemic those feelings of voicelessness had become. |
| I also came to the issue of abstention too confident in the capacity of British politics to represent competing opinions. That attitude was coloured by experience as a foreign correspondent in places where such capacity is absent. When people in Moscow and Minsk complained that there was no point in voting, it was hard to disagree. The same lament on British streets sounded complacent, even ungrateful. There was certainly convergence between New Labour and David Cameron’s Conservative party in the first decade of the 21st century, but it was grotesque hyperbole to say meaningful regime change was unavailable. | I also came to the issue of abstention too confident in the capacity of British politics to represent competing opinions. That attitude was coloured by experience as a foreign correspondent in places where such capacity is absent. When people in Moscow and Minsk complained that there was no point in voting, it was hard to disagree. The same lament on British streets sounded complacent, even ungrateful. There was certainly convergence between New Labour and David Cameron’s Conservative party in the first decade of the 21st century, but it was grotesque hyperbole to say meaningful regime change was unavailable. |
| Is Britain more democratic than Belarus? Obviously yes. Is that a useful basis from which to understand why millions of British people felt their democracy was unresponsive? Clearly not. The task of restoring confidence in the system does not begin with a rebuke to the reluctant for having unrealistic demands and refusing to endorse some second-best compromise. | Is Britain more democratic than Belarus? Obviously yes. Is that a useful basis from which to understand why millions of British people felt their democracy was unresponsive? Clearly not. The task of restoring confidence in the system does not begin with a rebuke to the reluctant for having unrealistic demands and refusing to endorse some second-best compromise. |
| The irony is that Brexiters now present former remain voters with a version of that proposition: you lost, get over it; confine your preferences to a spectrum that includes only variants of a policy you consider to be disastrous. Some leavers relish our despair, seeing it as comeuppance for years in which metropolitan liberalism is supposed to have hogged the political centre-ground. | The irony is that Brexiters now present former remain voters with a version of that proposition: you lost, get over it; confine your preferences to a spectrum that includes only variants of a policy you consider to be disastrous. Some leavers relish our despair, seeing it as comeuppance for years in which metropolitan liberalism is supposed to have hogged the political centre-ground. |
| But while elections necessarily change balances of power and shuffle the order in which interest groups will be heeded, enthusiasm for democracy itself should not be a zero sum game. The satisfaction of one group shouldn’t propel its rivals so far beyond representation that they feel estranged from the whole process. For a pro-European, having just a small taste of that exile in the past 18 months has been salutary. It doesn’t discourage me from voting, but it is cause to regret not having listened better to all those people who said they had no one to vote for. | But while elections necessarily change balances of power and shuffle the order in which interest groups will be heeded, enthusiasm for democracy itself should not be a zero sum game. The satisfaction of one group shouldn’t propel its rivals so far beyond representation that they feel estranged from the whole process. For a pro-European, having just a small taste of that exile in the past 18 months has been salutary. It doesn’t discourage me from voting, but it is cause to regret not having listened better to all those people who said they had no one to vote for. |
| • Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist | • Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist |