BBC study suggests well-informed people voted Conservative in 2017 ...
A study by academics commissioned by the BBC found two interesting correlations between sources and quality of people's political knowledge and how they voted in GE2017.
Interestingly, one of these is a message that Conservatives will not be happy about and the other is a message which people on the left won't like.
Both correlations applied to people WITHIN each age range as well as overall, which means that the an obvious explanation which will occur to most people for the first correlation and to people on the left for the second one - that older people are more likely to vote Conservative and use the internet less while younger people use the internet more and were more likely to vote Labour - is not sufficient to explain these results, or at least, cannot be used to dismiss these findings.
The study was commissioned by the BBC from Professors Harold Clarke, Matt Goodwin, Paul Whiteley and Marianne Stewart who are US and UK election experts. The BBC report of their findings is titled How the internet helped Labour at the General Election.
This title comes from their first finding, that people who said they mainly used the internet to learn about politics were more likely to vote Labour and less likely to vote Conservative.
That, obviously is the warning which Tories won't like, and suggests that we need to improve our internet campaigning.
The second finding which was that those who scored well above average in a quiz to test for political knowledge were more than twice as likely to vote Conservative and less likely to vote Labour, while those whose level of political knowledge was well below average were much more likely to vote Labour.
Cue everyone on the right of the political spectrum saying "no surprise there then" and everyone on the left doing a Richard Wilson ...
Back in the 19th century - when being a conservative with a small "c" tended to mean things like supporting "rotten boroughs" or that women should not have the right to vote - John Stuart Mill wrote that not all conservatives were stupid but most stupid people were conservatives.
If I wanted to tease my friends on the left - I do have some - I might quote this BBC study as evidence that in the second decade of the 21st century the boot is on the other foot.
In actual fact I have met many well informed and intelligent people on the right, centre and left of the political spectrum, and also many rather less well informed and intelligent people in all parts of that spectrum, and furthermore there is no single monolithic "Tory" or "Socialist" worldview which all the people who support the Conservatives or Labour believe - both garner support from people with an amazingly diverse coalition of ideas.
What this study does do is provide evidence that those people on the left who think they have a monopoly of wisdom are wrong.
Interestingly, one of these is a message that Conservatives will not be happy about and the other is a message which people on the left won't like.
Both correlations applied to people WITHIN each age range as well as overall, which means that the an obvious explanation which will occur to most people for the first correlation and to people on the left for the second one - that older people are more likely to vote Conservative and use the internet less while younger people use the internet more and were more likely to vote Labour - is not sufficient to explain these results, or at least, cannot be used to dismiss these findings.
The study was commissioned by the BBC from Professors Harold Clarke, Matt Goodwin, Paul Whiteley and Marianne Stewart who are US and UK election experts. The BBC report of their findings is titled How the internet helped Labour at the General Election.
This title comes from their first finding, that people who said they mainly used the internet to learn about politics were more likely to vote Labour and less likely to vote Conservative.
That, obviously is the warning which Tories won't like, and suggests that we need to improve our internet campaigning.
The second finding which was that those who scored well above average in a quiz to test for political knowledge were more than twice as likely to vote Conservative and less likely to vote Labour, while those whose level of political knowledge was well below average were much more likely to vote Labour.
Cue everyone on the right of the political spectrum saying "no surprise there then" and everyone on the left doing a Richard Wilson ...
Back in the 19th century - when being a conservative with a small "c" tended to mean things like supporting "rotten boroughs" or that women should not have the right to vote - John Stuart Mill wrote that not all conservatives were stupid but most stupid people were conservatives.
If I wanted to tease my friends on the left - I do have some - I might quote this BBC study as evidence that in the second decade of the 21st century the boot is on the other foot.
In actual fact I have met many well informed and intelligent people on the right, centre and left of the political spectrum, and also many rather less well informed and intelligent people in all parts of that spectrum, and furthermore there is no single monolithic "Tory" or "Socialist" worldview which all the people who support the Conservatives or Labour believe - both garner support from people with an amazingly diverse coalition of ideas.
What this study does do is provide evidence that those people on the left who think they have a monopoly of wisdom are wrong.
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