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Really useful articles on here. We all agree we should be putting images, videos and hyperlinks into the digital resource.

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A good article about how compulsory voting works in Australia.

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After such a marginal win for the Leave camp in the EU referendum and a 72.2% national turnout, it's clear that the 27.8% who didn't vote could have had a huge sway.

With 33.6 million people voting it was considered a huge turnout. The last general election only saw 66.1% of the population vote and in 2001 it was just 59.4%.

But regionally, it was the areas with the highest share of older voters that had the highest turnout, suggesting young people made up a higher proportion of those who didn't vote.

Age breakdown on Brexit polls tells underlying story. Older generation voted for a future the younger don't want: pic.twitter.com/kMPECqQF6u

- Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) June 24, 2016

When we look at how different age groups voted affected the vote (75% of age 18-24 voted to remain vs 39% of age 65+ according to a YouGov poll) it's clear that it was the Remain camp that lost vital votes. When the EU referendum decision moulds the future of the country, young votes were important and yet there weren't enough of them.

So, it begs the question, what would the outcome have been if voting was compulsory?

Some 11 countries have enforced compulsory voting and after the EU referendum there could be a case for the UK following suit. Belgium has the oldest existing mandatory voting system, introduced in 1892 for men and 1949 for women. If citizens fail to vote in four elections they face losing the right to vote for 10 years.

(Yui Mok/PA)

In Bolivia if citizens can't show their proof of voting card three months after an election they can be prevented from taking their salary out of the bank. In Greece, it's more weakly enforced, but it can be difficult to get a driving licence or new passport if you don't vote.

Australia has enforced voting since 1924. For those aged 18 and over if you can vote but don't you're fined $20 (£11), unless you have a valid reason like being in an accident. If you don't pay the fine or have a valid reason you could end up in court facing a much larger fine and court costs. And if you fail to pay that fine you could technically end up with a criminal record.

The Australian system doesn't see "politics doesn't affect me" or "I don't like any of the candidates" as a good enough reason not to exercise the right (or civil duty in their case) to vote in general elections, by-elections or referendums.

Strangely that hasn't resulted in 100% of the population voting (it was 94% in the last general election, some people chose to pay the fine instead) but it's significantly higher than in the UK.

(Rui Vieira/PA)

Compulsory voting - or requesting that people actively abstain - would surely solve at least some of the political apathy and disengagement. If you have to take the time to register to vote and then walk to a polling station, you'd think most people would bother to do some research into their voting options. And after the EU referendum results - with 51.9% voting to leave and 48.1% to remain - no one can argue voting doesn't change anything.

So should voting should be a civil duty, much like paying tax, rather than right or a social expectation? Or does compulsory voting contradict democracy altogether?

The right to vote was fiercely sought (and is still being sought in some countries) but should that stay a right that citizens can pick and choose? It's what some argue in Australia.

Russell Brand argues there's no point in voting (Matt Crossick/PA)

After all, a high turnout doesn't necessarily translate to a politically engaged electorate, there's nothing stopping people from randomly ticking a box they've put no thought into. Which is why some campaigners call for a 'none of the above' box because conscious abstention is preferable to not participating at all.

Critics also argue that enforced voting means politicians don't have to do as much to inspire people to vote and give people a good reason to engage. But maybe some politicians don't focus enough on policies affecting young people at the moment because they know less votes come from people those aged 18-24 - compared to older generations more likely to vote.

And it's argued that people who don't vote - generally young, from poor backgrounds or disenfranchised from politics - are the people who should be voting, and who may benefit the most from changes made by politics.

This may certainly turn out to be the case in post-Brexit Britain.

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Should we have compulsory voting in the UK?

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After such a marginal win for the Leave camp in the EU referendum and a 72.2% national turnout, it's clear that the 27.8% who didn't vote could have had a huge sway. With 33.6 million people voting it was considered a huge turnout.

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This is a good link, it shows a breakdown of the comparisons of people who voted in this years general election.

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YouGov conducts one of Britain's biggest ever post-election surveys to chart how the nation's political character is shifting

Since last week's election result YouGov has interview over 50,000 British adults to gather more information on how Britain voted. This is part of one of the biggest surveys ever undertaken into British voting behaviour, and is the largest yet that asks people how they actually cast their ballots in the 2017 election.

The bigger sample size allows us to break the results down to a much more granular level and see how different groups and demographics voted on Thursday.

Age

In electoral terms, age seems to be the new dividing line in British politics. The starkest way to show this is to note that, amongst first time voters (those aged 18 and 19), Labour was forty seven percentage points ahead. Amongst those aged over 70, the Conservatives had a lead of fifty percentage points.

In fact, for every 10 years older a voter is, their chance of voting Tory increases by around nine points and the chance of them voting Labour decreases by nine points. The tipping point, that is the age at which a voter is more likely to have voted Conservative than Labour, is now 47 - up from 34 at the start of the campaign.

Despite an increase in in youth turnout, young people are still noticeably less likely to vote than older people. While 57% of 18 and 19 year-olds voted last week, for those aged 70+ the figure was 84%.

Class

As noted at the start of the campaign, the class divide in British politics seems to have closed and it is no longer a very good indicator of voting intention. Despite dramatic voter movements towards Labour over the past few weeks this theme has held reasonably consistent: Labour is now 4% behind amongst ABC1 voters and 2% behind amongst C2DE voters.

The picture is a bit more mixed if we split this out further, with Labour doing best amongst DE voters (semi-skilled and unskilled manual occupations, unemployed people and those in the lowest grade occupations) and the Tories doing best amongst C2 voters (skilled manual occupations).

Education

Alongside age, education has become one of the key electoral demographic dividing lines. We saw it was a huge factor in the EU referendum campaign and, after the last general election, we made sure we accounted for educational qualifications in our methodology. In last week's vote, while the Conservatives' support decreases the more educated a voter is, the opposite was true for Labour and the Lib Dems.

Amongst those with low educational qualifications (defined as GCSE or equivalent or below) the Conservatives beat Labour by 22%. However amongst those with high level educational qualifications (defined as degree-level or above) Labour led by 17 percentage points. Part of this relationship is down to age - the expansion of education means that, on average, the young have more qualifications than the old, although the Conservatives still have a "graduate problem" even after accounting for this.

Gender

There was only a small gender gap between men and women, with women being equally split between Labour and the Conservatives (43% to 43%), and men slightly more likely to have backed the Tories (45% to 39%).

Employment status

Given the importance of age and voting it is not surprising that there is also a link between people's employment status and who they cast their ballot for. The Conservatives are 39 points ahead amongst retirees and Labour are 45 points ahead amongst full-time students.

Labour is in fact ahead amongst those in work: 4 points ahead amongst those working part time and 6 points ahead amongst those working full time, illustrating how the Conservatives are increasingly relying on the grey retired vote.

Newspaper

Beyond standard demographics, our data also shows a wide variation in voting behaviours based on the newspapers people read. The most pro-Conservative newspapers are the broadsheet Telegraph (+67), but also the "blue-top" Express (+62) and Daily Mail (+57).

The most pro-Labour newspapers are the Guardian (+65), the now fully-online Independent (+51), and the Daily Mirror (+49). This is based on the newspaper that respondents say they read "most often".

Photo: PA
See the full results here

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How Britain voted at the 2017 general election | YouGov

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Since last week's election result YouGov has interview over 50,000 British adults to gather more information on how Britain voted. This is part of one of the biggest surveys ever undertaken into British voting behaviour, and is the largest yet that asks people how they actually cast their ballots in the 2017 election.

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this may be a useful article

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A boosted youth vote is believed to have contributed to Labour's shock election result, but what made young people turn out to vote?

In 2015, voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds was estimated to be 43%, compared with a 66.1% turnout overall. This year, YouGov puts the youth turnout at 58%.

Polling traditionally shows that a majority of young people vote Labour. This year, the proportion has jumped to 63% for 18-29-year-olds, according to YouGov.

So how did this change happen?

Social adverts

Sam Jeffers, co-founder of Who Targets Me, which monitored the use of social media adverts by the political parties during the general election, said it seemed clear that Labour defeated the Conservatives in the social media battle.

Labour's adverts had consistently been shared more widely by social media users, he said.

Part of this appears to be down to the difference in tone of the adverts.

While the Conservatives had almost entirely focused their adverts on the strength of Prime Minister Theresa May and the weakness of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Labour's social media adverts had been more positive, seeking to emphasise that the party was building a social movement, he said.

And this had been combined with the repeated use of adverts with practical messages designed to increase youth voter turnout by giving instructions on how to register to vote and where to find local polling stations.

Adverts also appeared to have been released on specific days on the basis that their message was likely to cut through for only a limited amount of time, Mr Jeffers said.

For example, Labour had invested heavily on adverts attacking the Tories' so-called "dementia tax" on social care costs, days before the 8 June election.

The aim of this appeared to be to suppress the older, potentially Conservative, vote or get them to switch to Labour at the last minute, Mr Jeffers said.

Labour also focused its attention on more of the UK, targeting 464 constituencies in the final two days of the election campaign. The Tories targeted 205.
Was it Facebook wot swung it?
Viral videos

While the Labour Party paid for targeted adverts on social media, Momentum - the group that was set up to support Mr Corbyn's leadership bid and now campaigns for Labour - had a different social media strategy.

Rather than pay for advertising, it instead sought to create content it hoped social media users would share voluntarily.

The group created videos - many of them parodies - it hoped would become viral.

These included Daddy, why do you hate me? - a mock political broadcast telling people to vote for Theresa May "because your children deserve worse" - which Momentum says has been viewed more than 7.6 million times across social media platforms.

Its Facebook and Twitter pages feature a mixture of content, from posts mocking Theresa May's record to videos of Mr Corbyn hugging some of his supporters.

Joe Todd, from Momentum, said the group had felt its strategy was working when it had realised many of the people sharing its content were not typical supporters of Mr Corbyn.

Increasingly, users liking its Facebook page had been people who also liked the pages of TV programmes not known for their political audiences, such as Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway and Match of the Day, he said.

"We were breaking out of the leftie bubble," Mr Todd said.

Mobilising campaigners

Using message services to reach the young - and in some cases mobilising them into an army of potential canvassers - had been important in reaching the youth vote, Mr Todd said.

Momentum says it reached some 400,000 people through the messaging platform WhatsApp, which data shows is used most by 18-to 29-year-olds, in the UK.

The group also set up mynearestmarginal.com - a website that enables activists to pool together, and often lift share, to canvass in marginal seats.

Momentum says the website was used by about 100,000 people - more than four times as many as its 24,000 membership.

This meant young people with no experience of canvassing could team up with those with previous election experience for targeted canvassing.

"If you have a young person telling another young person, 'You should get out and vote because this election is important', it's more convincing," Mr Todd said.

Manifesto

There was also an unashamed pitch for the youth vote at the heart of Labour's manifesto For the Many, Not the Few - and that was the eye-catching promise of scrapping tuition fees for university students and the pledge to reintroduce their maintenance grants.

Further policies pitched with the young in mind included the ending of zero-hour contracts and unpaid internships, a rise in the minimum wage, and a pledge to build more than one million homes.

Of course, Labour wasn't the only party that targeted young people and it's hard to quantify the effect of the manifesto in getting the young out to vote, but Mr Todd felt it was among the most significant factors.

"It conjured up a sense of hope," he said.

Protest movement

The Labour campaign also featured large rallies that accompanied Jeremy Corbyn's speeches around the country.

Mr Corbyn had been a long-standing supporter of the protest movement, and the veteran anti-war campaigner was well placed to appeal to a growing number of young people who had become engaged in politics through these movements, according to Sam Fairbairn, national secretary of the People's Assembly protest group.

Although the People's Assembly does not endorse individual parties or candidates, Mr Fairbairn said the group - and its numerous local affiliates and sister organisations - had encouraged members to join Mr Corbyn's campaign rallies.

"It's no accident Jeremy has been part of these movements since he's been in politics. This is how many young people have got into politics in the last 10 years," Mr Fairbairn said.

"What we saw was the result of the work all these movements have done."

A string of endorsements from anti-establishment celebrities and musicians, including from the world of grime - a genre of music that blends garage and jungle and has a Jamaican influence - also, arguably, further bolstered Mr Corbyn's youth credentials.

Mr Corbyn also took part in interviews with outlets - such as rock magazines NME and Kerrang, and football YouTube channel Copa90 - outside of the political mainstream that were more likely to reach younger audiences.

Becka Hudson, from the #Grime4Corbyn campaign, told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme Mr Corbyn had "offered young people a programme they can believe in and a better future".

'Victory realistic'

The question is what happens next with that youth support.

Is there the danger the young will be discouraged by the election result and be less likely to turn out at the next election, whenever that may be?

Mr Todd thinks the opposite is the case.

"For most people this project was something they believed in, but it seemed like it might not be possible. Now the prospect of victory is really realistic," he said.

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A boosted youth vote is believed to have contributed to Labour's shock election result, but what made young people turn out to vote? In 2015, voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds was estimated to be 43%, compared with a 66.1% turnout overall. This year, YouGov puts the youth turnout at 58%.

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A Level British Politics | Should voting in the UK be made compulsory?

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Guide to UK elections, electoral systems, voting, voter behaviour, referendums, by-elections and political party systems

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Not sure if this is positive or negative but it's funny