Some half baked thoughts about election turnout numbers
2024-07-13 17:43:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I'm having trouble thinking this through and articulating it, so bear with me. Hopefully this will turn into something a bit more cohesive over time. That’s part of the magic of blogging, it doesn’t a always have to be perfect, it’s a journey, it’s a work in progress.
It seems only 50% of the population voted in the recent UK elections. My initial reaction to this was that it’s a rather terrible statistic. I think the thinking is that you really want the number to be high so you can have greater confidence that the government that gets voted in is well aligned with most of the population. That seems to make some logical sense.
For comparison, I read a figure that the French election turnout was 67%. On the surface that seems like a much "better" number. But is it really though? The more I think about it, the more I’m starting to think there’s a lot more nuance involved.
Perhaps a low turnout is a sign people don’t feel engaged in society, and that might be a sign of bad things to come. On the other hand I’d also be worried if the turnout was very high but everyone was super partisan. For example, it‘s clear that things are in pretty bad shape in France politically. Sure we had a low turnout in the UK, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. What is the turnout number even telling us?
I feel like we are looking at this number like it‘s a speedometer when it’s actually measuring something slightly ridiculous like the number of birds that fly by per minute, which tells you precisely not much at all.
I'd like to be better informed on exactly what this number tells us, and what it doesn’t.