Previous Poll Results

Find out the results of our online polls.

Have the party leader debates held on TV changed your mind on which party to vote for in the general election?

The result, with 835 votes cast, is:

• Yes: 23%
• No: 48%
• Still undecided: 19%
• Not going to vote: 10%

10 May 2010

A response from our experts

The poll figures are interesting among other reasons because they would have provoked different responses at different stages of the campaign.

A game-changing significance?

After the first debate, the media commentary assumed that it had had, and would continue to have, a game-changing significance on the campaign. It was assumed that the debates would be responsible for influencing more votes than any single event in recent election campaigns - in particular, in the direction of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. As time went on, the polls started to look more like they had at the onset of the campaign.

The exit poll, and the eventual result, were VERY like the pre-debate polls, so the NET effect of the debates was much smaller than was originally assumed.

A temporary bounce

In the USA, it is a general rule of psephology that media coverage of a reasonably successful party convention for the Republicans or the Democrats will result in a temporary "bounce" of about 10% in the polls. After both conventions, the polls often end up somewhere pretty close to where they were before.

Something comparable probably occurred here. Because of the media coverage of the debates, and the way political debate had been framed in their aftermath, there was a clear short-term "bounce" for Nick Clegg and his party, which was not sustained.

The 'real' winners

The biggest irony, perhaps, is that while the polls, and the eventual result, showed a subsequent loss of that momentum, the final outcome of the election (as opposed to its statistical results) HAS brought about a major advance for the Liberal Democrats in terms of their political power, even though their vote barely increased, and their seats tally actually declined.

The "winners" of the debates turned out to be the "real" winners of the election after all!

Voter behaviour

The fact that a big majority of poll respondents said they had NOT been influenced by the debates is probably representative of actual voter behaviour.

The number of people undecided was, if anything, smaller than the numbers in the population at large (which was reported as around 30% only a few days before polling).

Sadly, the actual number of non-voters remained much higher than among those who took part in our poll - more like 35%.

Perhaps those who took the time to vote in the University poll are, by definition, interested enough to participate, and therefore that much likelier to vote in reality. Given the sometimes too ready assumptions of voter apathy among the young, this might be an encouraging sign for the future, even though overall turnout in the 2010 Election, despite the debates, was not especially high by historical standards.

Paul Brighton (Principal Lecturer - Department of Media & Film Studies - Subject Leader - Media, School of Law, Social Sciences and Communications).

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