Making My Mind Up

Deciding how to vote in the 2024 General Election

Nick Barlow
6 min readJul 2, 2024

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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…

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Nick Barlow

Former academic and politician, now walking, cycling and working out what comes next. https://linktr.ee/nickbarlow