On Saturday 9 September 2006, Dr Roger Mortimore (Ipsos MORI's Senior Political Analyst) spoke at the EPOP Conference in Nottingham*, on "Ethnic Minority Voters and Non-Voters at the 2005 British General Election", delivering a paper by himself and Kully Kaur-Ballagan (Ipsos MORI Head of Ethnic Minority Research). The paper, which draws on Ipsos MORI research conducted for the Electoral Commission after last year's election, explores the turnout and votes of Britain's various Black and minority ethnic (BME) communities. Turnout is strongly associated with a positive attitude to elections in general, as might be expected; but there is also some evidence of a strong community effect, with those who live in areas with many other BME residents disproportionately likely to have voted. Surprisingly, there is no evidence that attitudes to the government's policy in Iraq had any significant effect. The findings also illustrate how a high quality research design, including respondents from areas of low as well as high BME population, is necessary to conduct reputable and accurate surveys of Britain's minority ethnic population — many published surveys of this group concentrate solely on those parts of the country with a substantial BME presence, which in this case would have produced entirely misleading results.

Download: Ethnic Minority Voters And Non-Voters At The 2005 British General Election pdf, 276KB

*EPOP, or the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties specialist group of the Political Studies Association, is the principal organisation of British academic and other experts on voting behaviour, opinion polling and related subjects. The 2006 annual conference is being held at the University of Nottingham on 8-10 September 2006.