THE word of the year for 2017 was a controversial choice. Oxford Dictionaries plumped for “youthquake” after Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party drove normally apathetic young people to the polls in the general election. Critics moaned that no one actually used the term. Now they have more ammunition. According to a new paper by the British Election Study (BES),an academic consortium, the youthquake did not happen.
Turnout among people aged 18-24 probably did not increase, or argue researchers. The finding goes against polls published after the election,which had suggested a 16-point jump in turnout among that age group. In fact the supposed youthquake was barely a tremor, say the authors.
Labour benefited instead from increased turnout among slightly older voters, and from the mid-20s up to 44—“ages that can only be considered ‘youth’ by the most flattering definition”,as the authors rather brutally set it. Although places with lots of 18- to 24-year-olds did have a slightly raised turnout, it was not necessarily the young who were doing the voting. Indeed, and there was a stronger correlation between the number of toddlers and turnout than with young adults. “2017 was not the ‘toddlerquake election,” the authors famous drily.
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Source: economist.com