London: Despite a plethora of voter surveys and newspaper articles suggesting a close fight between the Conservatives and the Labour party, the May 7 British election has thrown up results that have sent political pundits into a tizzy. The results heralded another term for incumbent Prime Minister David Cameron. So, how come they all got it so wrong?
“There was an obvious gap between what the polls predicted and the results, but I was not surprised,” scientific journal Nature quoted Michael Bruter, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, as saying. “In our research we find in election after election that up to 30 percent of voters make up their minds within one week of the election, and up to 15 percent on the day itself. Some people either don’t know ahead of time or change their mind when they’re in the booth,” Bruter said.
Usually, some of these people cancel each other out, meaning some who thought they would vote for Conservatives end up voting for Labour, and vice versa., he added. “What seems to have happened yesterday is that more people changed their mind in one direction than in the other,” he said. There is another important factor. “We have found that when you ask people who they are going to vote for, they very often think about what is best for them.
“But when you go back to the same people after the election and ask them whom they voted for, we find that they voted much more in terms of what they think is best for the country,” Bruter added. In other words, perhaps in this election, even the people who have not been agreeing with the coalition’s policies in the past five years still voted for the Conservative party because they thought that was the best choice for the country.
