These are the results of an unofficial survey to investigate the reasons why people are and are not voting Green. It was created by Green Party members, but not in an official capacity. There were 312 responses*, the majority of which came from social media such as Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. For this reason the survey is not fully representative of the general population; however is good enough to be able to draw certain conclusions - these will be outlined below.
* <1% of results were trimmed because they contained hateful remarks with no value, were blank or were duplicates.
The following page is an interactive infographic. That means when you click on stuff, stuff happens. In this case, if you click on a slice in a pie chart, the rest of the charts will only show data relevant to that slice of the chart. The same is true for bar charts, and in the case of the Age chart you can drag out a range too. You can select multiple things at once - so if you wanted to see people under 20 that match closely with Green you could select Green from the Affiliation chart, and drag from 0 to 20 on the Age chart. From there you can see that the most important policies to them are Equality and their key issue is Reform of the voting system. Feel free to experiment; if you get lost click the Reset all graphs button on the left! Alternatively if you aren't feeling adventurous, read the summary and look at the pretty graphs!
There are several conclusions that can be drawn from the results:
If you find more interesting conclusions, please leave a comment here on this Reddit post and I'll include it above and credit you.
The most striking conclusion from the results are that: people really don't like the current policies on nuclear policy and GM(O). This tracks with the anecdotal evidence collected which prompted the study and formed our original hypothesis. Another striking finding is the sheer number of people aged 17 who completed the survey. We are hoping that this is a sign for a good 2015 general election turnout.
Unfortunately the demographic seen by the survey mean that our results are skewed and not a true representation of the voting public. I would highly recommend a follow-up survey be completed by trained statisticians that can correctly account for biases within the sample demographic.
The demographics of the survey indicate who participated in the study. The results of the age demographic are really surprising - a significant portion of the responses were age 17. This is particularly interesting given these demographic track as one of the least politically engaged. This is encouraging as it means this group is engaged in politics, just not with the major parties.
Policies were listed out for the responder to choose a small selection from. This was intended to make people think hard about what really matters to them rather than blindly ticking all the boxes in agreement or disagreement.
Single Issues are topics which are too specific or high profile to fall into a policy category. Key policies were listed out by the survey organizers based on what we saw as potential reasons for switching from major parties. Blocking/Uneasy/Favourite single issues were not given to the responder - all responses were given unprompted (and then grouped into a broadly named topic).
Despite starting with an initial hypothesis, we set out to conduct the research in a way that could not be seen as leading to get the result we want. It is for this reason that many of our questions were open-ended and allowed for a lot of input from the participant.
Voters are put off voting for the Green Party due to a number of policies seen as 'anti-science'. These includes hard-line stances against nuclear power and GM(O).
We were expecting some confirmation of this reason, but the actual results collected were staggering.
To give high quality survey results with as much transparency as possible we version tracked changes to the data past a certain point. This was done once the email addresses and open questions had been processed - this data could potentially have been used to identify the individual.
The source code is made available with an MIT license. Do what you want with it, just don't blame or sue us if it causes a zombie apocalypse, insults your mother or anything else. The data is being released into the public domain - although please do let us know if you want to use the data for something like write an article about it.