Sir Bob says disengagement, not apathy

Sir Robert Worcester is a Visiting Professor of Government at LSE and an Honorary Fellow. He founded MORI in 1969.

The Hansard Society recently launched “Audit of Engagement 7: The 2010 Report with a focus on MPs and Parliament” which contains the results of the Ipsos MORI survey carried out last November. This provides a look at the state of British public opinion in the run-up to the impending election to take place on May 6^th.

It is my intention to file several blogs sharing my analysis of the Audit survey to this site, not so much as the Founder of MORI, the polling agency, but as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Government at LSE.

In this first Worcester’s Blog, I offer some good news from work carried out by MORI for nearly 40 years which counters received wisdom about people’s interest in politics.  There is a wide-spread believe that dismay, even disgust, towards politics and politicians is widespread, a growing cancer in the state of the nation, and a threat to our democracy.  To some degree this is true, but it is in my contrarian view based on values research that it is temporary and if radical action is taken in the near future in addition to that taken recently by the Parliament, which only scratched the surface of reform.

There is no question about an erosion of voting, the evidence is clear.  (Chart 1):

When the turnout dropped precipitously between the 1997 election (‘Labour’s Landslide’) and 2001 (‘Labour’s Second Landslide’) and hardly recovered in 2005 (‘Labour’s Landslip’, which I defined as a ‘small landslide’), politicians and pundits quickly blamed ‘apathy’.  It wasn’t apathy, it was disengagement. There was no decline whatsoever in interest in politics.

via blogs.lse.ac.uk

Click on link to read fascinating article

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