Thanks for downloading analysis. What excellent taste you have in podcasts.

Rosie Campbell is a professor of politics and used to dealing with complicated questions,

but this week she tries to answer a deceptively simple one. How do voters decide?

Election results have been taking us to unexpected places recently.

Pundits have become increasingly wary of... as to unexpected places recently.

Pundits have become increasingly wary of predicting the future, quite right too, some might say.

But we cannot hope to understand what voters might do next without answering one simple question, confronted with a ballot paper,

how do we decide what to do?

Political theorists would say, well, in order for government in a democracy to work,

citizens have to be voting, sending signals. for government

about what policies they want to have passed

and what policies they do not want to have passed.

Professor John Krosnick from Stanford University lays out the classical theory of how elections are meant to work.

Democracy is supposed to be about dialogue and deliberation.

We're meant to come to collective decisions about which policies

would work best for all of us. And to do this, photos ought to be fully informed and

have an open mind. But how many of us can really claim this to be true?

Ladies, gentlemen, when our approaching Sleaford,

Sleaford Station will be our next door. I went to Sleaford, a market town in rural

Lincolnshire where the residents were deciding how to vote in a by-election taking place the next day.

I asked the people I met how they were deciding who to vote for.

Good question.

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