Re: My research about how people in LIS see ID

Charles:
> I'm sorry. I must have been having a senior moment

Ah ha - happens to you too :-)

> This may be a political rather than a design point but I can't help
feeling that the SNP must have benefited from getting its name on the list
part of the ballot changed to "Alex Salmond for First Minister". Would it
have done the same if he had been called Zack or Zoe?

The issue of party names, i.e. whether parties should be allowed to describe
themselves as they wish, was one that the Electoral Commission specifically
asked us to investigate, and I believe that they had other research going on
at the time on the same topic.

Short version: The main effect we observed was that changes to the party
name simply made it more difficult for our participants to find the party
they wanted to vote for.

Longer version with explanation:

We didn't have that exact party name within the ballots that we tested, but
we did have quite a wide variation. For example, in the ballots we worked
with, we found all these variations on 'Conservative Party':

Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party
Conservatives
Conservative Party
Welsh Conservatives
Welsh Conservative Party
The Conservative Party

And these variations on 'Labour Party' as:
Scottish Labour Party
The Scottish Labour Party
Labour Party

For each voting task, we showed participants a list of candidates and asked
them to express a voting intention for the purposes of that day's test of
ballots. We didn't ask for their future voting intention or previous voting
history, but our impression was that mostly they did express a voting
intention that aligned with their usual intention. Mostly, they expressed
their voting intention in terms of a choice of party; the only consistent
exception to this was the election for Mayor of London, where they mostly
gave the name of a candidate.

So - most of the time, the participants were looking for a party name and
they wanted e.g. 'Conservative', 'Labour', 'Green' or whatever. Anything
more complicated than that just confused them and made it harder to find the
one they wanted.

Best
Caroline Jarrett
[email protected]
www.formsthatwork.com 




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