A constituency is the place a member of parliament will represent, the residents of the specific area eligible to vote will vote who they want to represent them at the house of parliament, there are over 650 constituency’s and all of them have an elected MP who will represent them in Parliament.

One reason why turnout has been fallen in the general election since 1997 may be the social and economic mix of the electorate, voter turnout tends to be lower in areas of higher unemployment, below average incomes and social inactivity. These people tend to be voters of the Labour party. The Labour party in 2001 struggled to get their core votes in these comstituency’s, this proving that thousands of people feel totally disengaged from politics and at a local and national level. Another reason why turnout may be low that of disengagement of younger voters and ethnic minorities, the decline of voter participation is highest for young voters also ethnic minorities may feel as if they are not being identified with from the leading UK political parties. The election campaign is a way of determining voting behaviour yes. With the election campaign it is easy to calculate statistics to find out voting behaviour, although you cannot determine why every person is or is not voting it gives us the closest figures we can get for voting behaviour i.e. seeing what figures are from which constituency’s, in the extract we see that in Liverpool Riverside there was a voter turnout of 41.4% and in West Tyrone there was a turnout of 80.2% proving to us that there is different voting behaviour in different regions of the country. This cannot show the feelings of why people may or may not vote though, some people may feel apathy, hapathy or just be completely unaware of politics all together, the election campaign however does show us the basic ideas of voting behaviour.