Electoral turnout

One of the main arguments unionists make for the narrow difference between the number of votes for unionism and the number of votes for nationalism (57,102 in 2010 westminster election and 42,272 in 2007 assembly election) in elections is that there is a greater level of unionist apathy among the electorate than nationalists.

In order to test this theory it is necessary to get a breakdown of both nationalist turnout and unionist turnout in recent elections.

For want of a better system, I have used the 18 constituencies as the basis for my analysis. If we take the eight constituencies held by nationalists and get the average turnout for each of these constituencies, we can assume that subject to an inevitable margin of error, that this average represents nationalist turnout. Similarly the same methodology can be used to calculate the unionist turnout. I have excluded european elections from our analysis due to the low turnout compared to assembly and westminster elections

The results are clear. In the early part of this decade nationalists were more likely to vote than unionists and the argument of greater unionist apathy was valid. However, In more recent elections the turnout of the two blocks seems to have leveled off. What is worrying for unionists is that as the nationalist turnout has declined one might expect the gap in the difference in votes between the two blocks to increase. However it has in fact fallen from approximately 70,000  to approximately 40,000! Unionism has reason to worry.