In what ways has political participation in the UK declined in recent years?

Authors Avatar by ashleighdaly (student)

High political participation is a key requirement in terms of democracy. If a Government has not been voted in by a high voter turnout, this decreases the Governments legitimacy, and in turn does not produce a strong and stable Government. There are many reasons as to why political participation has declined within recent years. The first way would be in terms of voter turnout. In 1983, the voter turnout was 72.7% nearly as low as the lowest percentage of 72% in 1970, the lowest since 1945. A steady increase was shown after 1983, 75.3% in 1987 and 77.7% in 1992. However after this election the voter turnout drops dramatically, 71.4% in 1997, lowering ever further to 59.4% in 2001, a percentage of closely over half the population, not representative of the entire population. From 2001 onwards, there has been shown to be a steady rise, to a high of 65.1% within the 2010 elections. Although the political party (Conservatives coalition with the Lib Dems) gained a ‘majority’ this may not have been the case if ALL of the population who were eligible to vote, voted.

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Another way political participation had declined is through the lack of party membership. There has been a major decline in party membership post the war period, 2010 figures show that only 1% of the electorate are a member of Labour, Lib Dems, or the Conservatives. Further findings of this report show that Labour had only 194,000 members, the Lib Dems had only 65,000 and the Conservatives had only 177,000 members. In contrast to these recent findings, within the early 1950’s the Conservatives had over 3 million members, and Labour 1 million. This is a shocking decline in party membership, which ...

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