Winning the legal right to vote has not produced equal rates of voting. At the 2024 general election, turnout varied sharply by demographic group.
| Group | 2024 turnout | Note |
| Age 18-24 | 37% | Down from 47 per cent in 2019, and back to levels last seen in 2015. |
| Age 25-34 | 41% | Down from 55 per cent in 2019, the sharpest fall of any age group. |
| Age 55+ | Broadly stable | Little change compared with 2019, so older voters made up a larger relative share of the electorate that actually voted. |
| White voters | 56% | Compared with 43 per cent among ethnic minority voters, a gap of around 13 percentage points. |
| Class / wealth | Not a single figure | IPPR’s constituency-level analysis found turnout markedly higher in seats with more older residents, more homeowners and a larger white population, concluding that ‘the haves speak much louder than the have-nots’ in British elections. |
Sources: Ipsos, “How Britain voted in the 2024 election”; IPPR, “Half of us: turnout patterns at the 2024 general election” (2024).
This raises a genuine question about what has driven the historic widening of the franchise: is the more urgent task today a widening franchise (removing remaining legal barriers, such as the age limit) or a deepening one (closing the gap between who is legally entitled to vote and who actually does)? The suffragists and suffragettes fought for the legal right itself; today’s low and unequal turnout suggests that having the right is necessary but not sufficient for a group’s voice to be heard, and that political education and a sense that voting matters may do as much to secure real representation as further legal reform.
- How does the UK compare with other countries? A voting age of 18 remains the international norm, used in the large majority of democracies, including the USA, France, Germany and India. A smaller group of countries, including Austria (the first EU country to adopt it, in 2007), Malta, Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador, already allow voting from 16, and Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man do the same closer to home. This makes the UK Government’s 2026 proposal a case of catching up with an established, if still minority, international practice, rather than an untested experiment.
| Check your understanding 1. Using the table, describe the pattern of turnout by age at the 2024 general election. (Describe, about 60-80 words: give the specific percentages for at least two age groups and note the direction of change since 2019.) 2. Explain the difference between a ‘widening’ and a ‘deepening’ franchise, using evidence from this document. (Explain, about 100 words: define both terms in your own words, then give one example of each from the document, for example votes at 16 as widening and the turnout gap as a deepening problem.) 3. ‘The legal right to vote matters more than the rate at which people use it.’ To what extent do you agree? Use evidence on turnout and on the suffragist/suffragette campaigns in your answer. (Evaluate, about 250-300 words – this is a synoptic, essay-style question: use the suffragist/suffragette campaigns as evidence that the right itself was worth fighting for, use the turnout data as evidence that having the right is not enough on its own, then reach an overall, supported judgement.) |