What happened to the student vote?

In the early stages of the Election campaign there was a considerable focus on student voters. With echoes of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, political parties scrambled to mobilize the vote, focusing initially on encouraging young people to register to vote. As in the US, the main impetus for this drive was online, in particular through social networks. During the four weeks of the campaign many commentators saw the surge in support for the Liberal Democrats as being driven by young voters, desperate for change from the old two-party system. Social media were the key to influencing this group, and each party set up FaceBook groups, Twitter accounts and posted promotional material onto Youtube.

In Wales there were something like 150,000 registered students who, if all eligible to vote, would have formed around 7% of the total electorate, concentrated in several key marginal constituencies. Their influence could be decisive, except of course there were nowhere near that number of eligible student voters: a very large number would have been overseas students, and another significant proportion would not have registered to vote in their student accommodation, despite the social media campaigns.

Indeed, looking at Wales as a whole, in those seats where there were universities, voter turnout was lower than average, increasing around 1% compared to a national increase of 2%. Once again, Labour and the Conservatives seemed to achieve identical shares of the vote in university towns and cities as they did in Wales as a whole. Votes for the Liberal Democrats were just 1% higher than the national average, and those for Plaid Cymru about 1% lower. These figures are hardly evidence of any massive surge of student voters to the polls.

Looking at individual constituencies can be instructive.

In Cardiff Central there would potentially be as many as 40,000 students eligible to vote, from Cardiff University and UWIC. This bloc would dominate the constituency, but of course was never so significant for reasons explained above, and because many students would have been living in outlying places. Cardiff Central superficially seemed to bear out the Liberal Democrat illusory surge as it was retained by the party's MP. In practice, though, the voter turnout did not change, and the Liberal lost over 8% of their 2005 vote, most of it to the Conservatives who increased their vote by over 12%.

In Swansea West there was another potential political upset with the Liberal Democrats threatening the sitting Labour MP. This was a comparatively marginal seat and one where the Liberals put a good deal of resource into developing the student vote through social media. Between them Swansea University and Swansea Metropolitan University could claim to have 24,000 students on campus, but in practice voter turnout increased only very slightly and below the average for Wales as a whole. In practice the Labour vote did crumble, but not enough to unseat the MP: but the Conservatives benefited from this as much as the Liberal Democrats, both of whom added around 4% to their vote.

Pontypridd saw a surge in support for the Liberal Democrats, which might in part have been attributable to the use of social media amongst the 21,000 students at the University of Glamorgan. The same caveats about overseas students and voter registration have to be noted, though, particularly as a proportion of the campus has relocated to central Cardiff. Indeed, there was no rush of new voters in Pontypridd – voter turnout actually declined in 2010, compared to a national increase of 2% or so. And while the Liberals increased their votes by 11% here, the Conservatives rose by 4%, and the main story was the relative collapse of the Labour vote.


The Arfon constituency was one where there was a genuine change of representation, as the seat was taken from Labour by Plaid Cymru. Were the 16,600 students in Bangor University responsible for this change? It is possible, as there was an above-average increase in voter turnout of 5%. But unusually this surge appeared to favour Plaid, as the Liberals lost 2% of their vote compared to a national increase of the same order. Labour also lost votes, but not as badly as elsewhere in Wales, and the Conservative vote stayed unchanged. Arfon, therefore, seemed to buck all of the national trends, electing a new Plaid Cymru MP when in the rest of the the country it lost votes.

Did the 12,000 students at Aberystwyth help to boost the sitting Liberal Democrat's vote by nearly 14%, way above the national average? It is possible, but it is important to note that voter turnout actually fell, by over 3%, one of the larger drops in Wales. So no apparent surge of new voters. The Conservatives lost votes: although the drop was small, it has to be set against a national increase of nearly 5%. And although Labour dropped votes too, they did less badly in Ceredigion than elsewhere in Wales. It is possible, therefore, that the student vote did help the Liberals in Ceredigion, but given the overall decline in voting this conclusion is far from certain.

Carmarthen East too might have benefited from the 12,000 students at Lampeter and Trinity, but here again the picture was mixed. All of the main parties did slightly better than average here, except for Plaid Cymru which lost over 10% of its vote (but retained the seat). There was a similarly mixed picture in Newport West where the local university's 9,000 students might conceivably have influenced the vote: here though, Labour and Plaid did better than their showing elsewhere in Wales, while the Conservatives and Liberals did worse, this on an above average increase in turnout. Wrexham's votes rose in line with the national picture: Glyn Dŵr University's 8,000 students did not appear to have influenced the result, where the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru were the main beneficiaries, while the Liberal Democrats rose in line with the increase in Wales as a whole and Labour underperformed, losing 9% of its votes, but retaining the seat.

In summary, therefore, no apparent surge of new student voters were in evidence in Wales. The impressive rises in the Liberal Democrats' votes in Ceredigion and Pontypridd may have had nothing to do with the student population as in these places voter turnout actually decreased. And the one place with the most significant student population, Cardiff Central, actually saw the Liberal Democrat vote drop sharply, with the Conservatives appearing to benefit the most. This was not what we had been led to believe would happen with the much vaunted Liberal surge.

In practice all of the main parties were using social media, but as we have noted in an earlier blog, the traffic was by no means one way. 'National Not Voting Conservative Day' on Facebook got support from 178,000 people, but was rejected by over 210,000 with a further 250,000 uncommitted. The official Conservative Party group on Facebook had 100,000 supporters on election day, more than the Liberal Democrats and almost twice the number that Labour had gathered. The Conservatives learned from the European Elections when we saw how they were able to co-opt the status updates of their supporters. They uploaded two dozen well-produced videos to WebCameron on YouTube: although much derided, some of these were viewed 180,000 times in a matter of days (for example 'This is a historic election', although viewing figures for some others were in the tens of thousands. We found that in Wales the Liberal Democrats seemed to focus on the use of emails (something that missed the mark with student voters) while younger Plaid Cymru candidates experimented with video blogs and used the multimedia capabilities of their smartphones effectively.

What seemed to have happened was that there was a general sense by the parties that they had to ride the new media wave in the way that Barack Obama had done (although many post 2008 studies have shown that the so-called voter surge there seems to have been over-hyped). But what politicians in the UK failed to do was to translate enthusiasm into action on the ground. US Democrats used social media to encourage voters to register by telling them where and when. They used the same channels in a major way to raise funds to support the campaign, something British parties steered away from. Most importantly the US Democrats linked virtual supporters to real campaigning events and local activists, channelling the latent interest into old-fashioned canvassing and providing the real evidence on the ground of what was suggesting itself online and in opinion polls. In the end the social media campaign kept itself to the virtual world: as our figures suggest, there was no surge in student voting in Wales. In the end the parties that brought in the vote had canvassers on the ground, and local party machines to get out the leaflets and put up the posters. In the end it was good old-fashioned politics which won.



13 May 2010



The study was carried out in Wales by Robin Croft (Principal Lecturer, University of Glamorgan Business School), and in Yorkshire by Dianne Dean (Lecturer, University of Hull Business School). The findings of this study and the research completed in the 2009 European Elections are due to be presented at a conference of the Political Marketing Association in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September.