Stability rather than volatility, now characterises voting behaviour at UK general elections. Discuss
There are many reasons why people choose to vote. Whether they have a strong view that agrees with the party they are voting for, or they are tactically voting so a certain party that they really don’t like doesn't get into parliament. Most of the time voting is devided into short term and long term decisions, which means that a certain member of the family will vote differently than usual because of a certain law that a party wants to pass.

Recently, and leading up to the 2015 General election, there have been declining levels of class alignment. This means that a member of the public that usually votes conservative, might decide to vote labour, or vice versa. This shows the volatile side of voting as these statistics change depending on what the parties promise, however, it is becoming more common for people to vote the opposite to what they usually vote for because of party policies. This makes it very hard for people to predict the way other people are going to vote.

Another point of volatile short term voting, is the declining levels of party id. This means there has been an increase in floating voters. The 2010 general election resulted in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives. In some respects, this was a surprising coalition and many of the parties laws they promised to change, never happened. Again this has had a knock on effect for the 2015 general election, because people cant trust the party they want to vote for in the short term!

The last point of Volatile short term voting is that generally people are more influenced by short term factors. An example of this would be when Labour voters, voted for the Liberal Democrats in protest of the Iraq war in the same way the Conservatives lost voters after Black Wednesday. This