Voting is a fundamental part of a democratic system. The whole premise of democracy is that governments derive their right to rule through being freely chosen by citizens. How votes translate into government formation and then government action depends on electoral systems, party systems and institutional design. There is a vast literature that addresses these factors (for example, Ware, 1996) which I will not cover in detail here. The fundamental principle of open elections remains common to all those different democratic systems. From the Chartists to the Suffragettes, to American civil rights activists and the demonstrators of the Arab Spring, people have been prepared to suffer hardship and death for the right to vote.

To understand how voting feeds through into first government creation and then policy, we need to look at why people vote the way they do. What factors can we use to explain the decision that they make as they pull the handle on a voting machine, or mark an ‘X’ on the ballot paper with (in my experience in the United Kingdom) a short and very blunt pencil? This chapter looks into voting behaviour, and how it is affected by culture and values.

Do policies determine how people vote?

In any British general election campaign, the party manifestos are a central theme. In 2017 there was huge excitement in the media when the Labour manifesto was leaked to the media before the formal launch. Journalists could pull out whatever aspects they were interested in and highlight them before the party leadership was able to set its own narrative. At 126 pages, with policies on everything from the future of the United Kingdom's independent nuclear deterrent to what percentage of their income from television rights the Premier League football clubs should invest into grassroots sport (Labour Party, 2017), there was plenty of opportunity to create stories. In this and in other recent elections, entrepreneurial and tech-savvy citizens have created websites where you could answer questions about your policy preferences and the site would match your answers to party manifestos and recommend which party was closest to your position.