This table has shown me to focus mainly on the labour and conservative parties due to them dominating the political agenda. This means that the labour and conservatives are the two which mainly debate over the policies.
I researched the BBC news web pages to look into the main political bodies so I had a full awareness of all the other parties registered with the electoral commission. These are some of the constituencies found in the UK:
I then decided to look into the election of 2005 so I could see a recent date with statistics. This would give me an idea of what people thought of each party:
Final election opinion polls 2005
Share of the vote
FINAL ELECTION OPINION POLLS Share of
Taking the average of all six, the share of the vote for Labour was 37.6% (actual share 36%), Conservatives 32% (33%) and Lib Dems 22.6% (23%).
Opposite shows how popular the three main parties were in 2001 according to the opinion polls. It shows that labour was considered better than conservative or liberal democrats, but why?
Tony Blair was still Prime Minister in 2001. Below is a snippet taken from an article- taken from
‘IT has often been said that Tony Blair's good looks helped him become Prime Minister - but it is his flapping ears rather than his charming smile that make him appealing, according to new research.
The PM's prominent ears are often the butt of jokes in political cartoons.
But a new study, carried out jointly by Glasgow Caledonian University and York University in Toronto, shows that humans are most attracted to faces that have distinct features - or a "caricature" element - such as Mick Jagger's lips or Tony Blair's ears.
The findings defy the traditional belief that those who have a symmetrical face are more attractive than those with an asymmetric physiognomy.’
This shows that females in particular found Tony Blair attractive, which could urge them to vote based on the politician’s front.
I also looked into how the media affects voter’s perceptions; I found a website called . I read an article called Media bias and voting, it’s about the American political system but can be related to the UK one.
‘They find that the introduction of Fox News had a small but statistically significant effect on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained an estimate of between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. They also find that Fox News had a significant effect on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Their estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican according to a first audience measure, and 11 to 28 percent according to a second, more restrictive audience measure.’
The media convinces voters to vote for a specific party by using televised broadcasts and articles in newspapers. The newspapers mainly give negative information so the target audience is reared away from that party. The information I found is very recent ( Jan ’08) and calls Gordon Brown a ‘coward’ and Cameron a ‘class cheat’. The only positive information I found was in an article by piers Morgan- taken from the mail on Sunday January 13th 2008. Brown is called a genius yet a tax thief by pundits who could confuse readers on why to vote for Brown. He states that ‘Cameron is everything Gordon isn’t: he’s slick, posh, arrogant and a tad smarmy’. However he writes that ‘If people could have seen him, they would never label him dour’. Morgan is practically saying that Gordon’s a nice guy but Cameron would be better as he is ‘everything Gordon isn’t’.
