RISJ find Prime ministerial TV debates made the young more interested in the campaign
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A study for Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University suggests that first-time voters in the UK formed a special relationship with the prime ministerial televised debates in striking contrast to their more jaded elders. The findings of the research are to be delivered in a lecture entitled Politics, Performance and Rhetoric the 2010 Prime Ministerial Debates on 7 February in the first of a new series of annual Reuters Institute/BBC David Butler lectures.
The leaders of the three main political parties, Gordon Brown (Labour), David Cameron (Conservative) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat) took part in three televised debates in the run up to the general election on 6 May. This is the first academic study using a large-scale, nationally-representative sample of the UK population into how our voting behaviour was affected by the TV debates, the first ever held in Britain.
Over half (55%) of the 18-24 year olds said that as a result of having seen the first debate they had become `more interested in the campaign, compared with less than a third (31%) of the 40-54 year-olds and just under a quarter (24%) of the respondents aged 55 and older.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of first-time voters considered that they had learnt something about the parties policies from the debates, compared with 63% of those aged 55 and older.
