Making My Mind Up

Deciding how to vote in the 2024 General Election

Photo by Steve Houghton-Burnett on Unsplash

This has been a strange election campaign for me as it’s the first time in several decades I’ve not been a member of a political party and so haven’t been involved in any campaigning. But it’s also been one where I haven’t come into it completely certain of how I’m going to vote, and so I’ve spent some time in the last few weeks working out just how I’m going to vote — and with a couple of days until election day, I’m still not sure of what it will be.

In my time in academia I studied and taught about voting behaviour, especially the difference between expressive and instrumental voting. Expressive voting is the idea that you’re voting to express your views about the world, in the simplest form it’s finding the candidate whose opinions are most like yours and voting for them. Instrumental voting (which includes what we call ‘tactical voting) is voting to achieve a specific end, like supporting a government or defeating a particular candidate.

The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. For instance, in every general election I’ve voted in I have voted instrumentally for the candidate who I think is best placed to defeat the Conservative candidate (and in all that time I was only wrong about who that candidate was once), but in some of those I’ve also been able to vote expressively for a Liberal Democrat candidate who was closest to my views at the time. So, I’m very used to voting instrumentally, but after three decades of that, I’m kind of bored with it (which is one of the reasons I’m very much in favour of a new electoral system).

So, here’s what I want to vote for in this election, in no particular order:

• I want an end to this Tory government, to see them finally kicked out of office for their lies, their greed, their incompetence, their bigotry and everything else they’ve done to make this country a worse place to live.
• I want serious action on climate change, with MPs and a government who take it seriously as a threat now, not at some point in the future.
• I want politicians who’ll stand up to the far right power grab that’s going on all over the world right now. I want to see aggressive advocacy for and defence of democratic values.