(Ir)Rational Voting Event at the Dana Centre

This event focused on how people choose to vote. Do they carefully consider each of the options that a political party offers, or do they get swayed emotionally?

An archived webcast of this event is available.

Speakers:

Dr Peter Bull, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of York. Peter's main focus was to briefly introduce the microanalysis of political communication set within the broader context of research on the social psychology of voting.
Mark Gill, Head of MORI's Political Research Unit. Mark looked at the three key determinates for floating voters: issues, leaders and policies.
Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and writer whose work examines how we interpret our world. Dorothy's focus was on how we vote for the political party which we think will allow us to be the kind of person we know ourselves to be.

The audience thoroughly engaged with the subject matter, and results of electronic questionnaires before and after the event clearly showed that the majority of the audiences opinions were not challenged or changed. This reflected the fact that when it comes to voting preferences, people are quite set in the way they vote, and that people are most likely to form their opinion on who to vote for from the look of the party manifesto and leaders, not the opinions of others.