| Abstract: | Much has been made of declining turnout in elections. This is due to a number of factors, and several remedies have been proposed. Voting behaviour seems to depend largely on socioeconomic factors. Partly due to the inordinate expense of household‐level statistics, however, little is known of the demographic breakdown of voting and non‐voting. An effective way of overcoming this would be to crudely estimate the demographics involved by allocating households to consistent voting groupings. Large geographic groups are unwieldy and probably not sufficiently accurate; however, postcode‐level definitions can allow similar but non‐adjacent households in the same general area to be treated as a unit for statistical purposes. This allows consistent trends in voting over the last four general elections in Scotland to be demonstrated. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications |
