Comment by mrec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrec | Hacker News Reader

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> would love to know how someone would do a study on the subject

It's normally called the "Shy Tory Factor" in the UK; Wikipedia has a page [1] but it's a bit thin.

After the 2015 GE the British Polling Council commissioned an independent inquiry on the subject, whose findings you can read here [2]. (Disclaimer: I haven't.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor

[2] http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/3789/1/Report_final_revised.pdf

What strikes me is how counterproductive this all is - in this week's case the inaccurate polling made the final result far more of a shock and thus presumably far more disruptive than it would otherwise have been. It may even have caused the final result - I think turnout for the under-25 demographic, which skewed heavily Remain, was only about a third, and I've seen several comments to the effect of "I didn't think I needed to vote, Remain was ahead anyway".

I've seen several comments to the effect of "I didn't think I needed to vote, Remain was ahead anyway".

I've even seen someone explain (on the BBC): "I didn't think my vote mattered, so I voted leave. I'm a bit worried now".

I really hope that that's a minor occurrence, I really don't want to consider the possibility that large parts of the voting public treat elections/referenda with less seriousness than the average talent show vote.

Nothing I've seen points to that being anything more than BBC spin. According to this poll [1] 4% of Remain voters are happy with the outcome while 1% of Leave voters are unhappy with it.

[1] https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/746820394217259008

(Caveat - it says "via ComRes" but it hasn't appeared in ComRes' published polls page yet.)

In an era where every quack with an opinion is broadcasting it online, the media can basically concoct whatever narrative they want by choosing to elevate a few people's ramblings to the level of news.

An honest headline for a lot of the news in the past couple days is "People on losing side of election unhappy". But then people would realize how stupid it is. And when the news is about people's reaction to the news, you begin to wonder what the real cause and effect is.

In normal UK elections, due to first-past-the-post-per-district, people are used to their vote not counting.

As an American, that's why I'm kind of shocked that this kind of issue only required a simple majority. Usually out in the states a change of this magnitude requires a super-majority. For example, to ban guns in the US would require a two thirds majority of states to be for.

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