Labour’s relatively poor performance in the 2007 Assembly election partly reflected a failure to get its voters to turn out, according to a major study conducted by the Institute of Welsh Politics at Aberystwyth University.
Of those who said they voted Labour in the 2005 general election, more (45%) did not vote at all in 2007 than turned out to vote Labour (37%).
However, Labour remain the most popular party in Wales, with the most popular and visible leaders.
When asked to rate the main party leaders in Wales, almost 90% of survey respondents had a clear opinion about Rhodri Morgan, whereas fewer than three fifths could do so for Plaid Cymru’s leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, and less than half were able to give an opinion about either Nick Bourne or Mike German.
Prof Roger Scully, co-director of the survey, said: “Devolution doesn’t seem to be making the people of Wales more ‘Welsh’ in how they define themselves.
“But they have become much more Welsh in how they want to be governed.
“Opposition to devolution has more than halved in the last 10 years; and, interestingly, it has fallen most quickly among those living in the more ‘anglicised’ parts of Wales, and amongst those in Wales who do not consider themselves as ‘Welsh’.”
The public appeared only modestly impressed by the policy record of the 2003-07 Assembly Government.
More than half of voters thought that it had made ‘No Difference’ to standards in education, for instance.
But they still rate the performance of the government in Cardiff more highly than that of the government in London.
Over a quarter of respondents said that the UK Government had done either a ‘Very Bad’ or ‘Fairly Bad’ job in recent years, compared with 16% for the Welsh Assembly Government.
There is also an interesting disparity in how people in Wales attribute policy outcomes.
The majority of those who think that things have improved in areas like health, education and the economy in recent years attribute this success to the Assembly Government; of those who think that things have declined, the majority blame the UK government.
Prof Richard Wyn Jones, director of the Institute of Welsh Politics said: “Generally speaking, the Welsh electorate tends to hold the new political institutions in Cardiff in higher esteem than Westminster and Whitehall.
“This is now a consistent finding across several years of research.
“But devolved politicians and their civil servants would be unwise to start breaking open the champagne.
“The fact is that the general attitude in Wales towards politicians and the political process is perhaps best characterised as apathy leavened with a healthy dose of suspicion.
“It’s just that those in Cardiff aren’t felt to be as quite as bad as those further down the M4”
The Wales Life and Times Survey 2007 is a study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, and conducted by the Institute of Welsh Politics at Aberystwyth University and the National Centre for Social Research.
Some 900 interviews were conducted face-to-face, with a representative sample of people from across all 40 constituencies in Wales, between May and August 2007.
