Hello and one to the Red Box Politics Podcast in The Times I'm Matt Cholly and it's an all new look

podcast we hope you like our new logo but don't worry the content of the podcast itself

will be its usual

variable quality. An election is coming sooner or later but what will happen?

Nobody knows or can really know for certain, but why don't we know, and what do we know about the

unknowable competing forces which will decide who runs the country? The British

Election Study has been surveying people about how they voted and why since 1964. A new book,

Electoral Shocks, the Volatile Voter in a Turbident World is out in December,

by which time we might have already had the election. So I'm delighted to be joined

by three of his authors to explain what is going on

and what to keep an eye on join the forthcoming campaign. Professor Chris Popper, Professor Jeff Evans, and this is

Professor Jane Green. British election study data over time shows us that more people are switching

their vote choice than ever before and that has an increasing rise and it's meant that in the

last two general elections in particular there's been a high point of switching.

So roughly 40% of the electorate has switched their vote choice between elections.

But if you look over three elections, we see that roughly half of the electorate is changing how it votes over subsequent elections.

That's a very different picture to the past, that's a very different environment.

The reason that's happened, we argue,

is a combination of long-term trends

and long-term changes such as weakening party attachments,

smaller parties getting voters, but then not being able to

hold on to them, and also short sharp events, what we call electoral shocks, major

...