SUs work on a cycle we all know well.
We welcome students to university, get them involved in SU events/societies/representation, welcome them back in January, get them to vote in the election, induct the new officers, repeat.
Every year, like clockwork, student voice teams zero in on elections turnout as their key indicator of how well their elections went and then proceed to pour time and resources into improving this one statistic.
Despite this, turnout often remains stubbornly low, and sector conversations tend to circle around the same explanations – that students are busy, unclear about roles, disengaged from politics, or simply hard to reach.
While each of these contains some truth, they tend to be treated as end points rather than prompts to look more closely at how democratic systems are designed and experienced.
A blind spot
Discussions about turnout and student democracy often have a slight blind spot.
The elections period itself becomes the focal point for measuring participation and visibility, with turnout figures standing in as a proxy for overall student interest.
But elections typically come along over halfway through the academic year. SUs treat voting in the election as a first step – really, it’s a final action in a series of decisions students make all year.
By the time an average student encounters a ballot station they’ve already formed impressions about whether their participation leads to visible change, about whether outcomes are communicated to them in a way that matters, and whether or not their time is respected.
These impressions aren’t always shaped by the democratic processes themselves, but often by smaller, quieter moments throughout the academic year – conversations with reps that don’t seem to lead anywhere, decision-making processes that feel confusing or hard to follow, or surveys and forums that ask for input without a clear outcome.
As SU staff we can see firsthand the incremental, often slow and unspectacular ways that democratic change shapes the workings of our SUs – but for students this is often invisible and, at worst, can look like total inaction.
When the connection between participation and outcome is unclear it makes sense that a lack of engagement follows – a rational response, rather than apathy. It goes beyond the students, too – providers have known for years that low turnout in elections can lead to questions about how significant student issues really are when they come through the elected officers, and an increasing number of SUs aren’t sure that elections are right for their students at all.
A narrow lens
Relying on turnout as the headline measure for how well an election performed can quietly narrow what democracy is allowed to be. Marketing the opportunity to nominate yourself replaces explaining the roles, visibility of the election replaces the impact of making sure that voting is understood, and short-term mobilisation overshadows building long-term trust with the voting members of the SU.
Staff effort becomes concentrated on the single week of voting in the second trimester, while students experience democracy as something they’re prompted to perform, rather than something they’re encouraged and supported to shape.
Turnout measures aren’t meaningless, of course, and they still go a long way towards showing student engagement with democracy – but what turnout really shows us is a reflection of the cumulative experience students have had of SU democracy, not a single data point to rely on.
If voting is the moment when students decide whether democracy has earned their time and effort, then the more important work needs to happen somewhere else.
Blaming students
Earlier this year (ARU Students) UNION transformed our staff away day into UNION Conference, a one-day, internal event where staff could present a session on their work. The title of my session was Fixing student democracy without blaming students. Did I deliver on that lofty promise?
Certainly not, but it was a chance for staff from across the team to reflect on what we learn from elections each year.
We started by looking at the cycle of work in the SU itself, everything from welcoming new students in September through to electing reps, then welcoming them back in January, to holding the elections, to celebrating with graduates at the end of the year.
Then we mapped the typical student’s year onto that, showing where they interact with us – Welcome Fairs, events, voting week – and where they don’t – their learning, their breaks, their jobs outside of university, everywhere they were too busy to interact with us. It showed us the obvious, of course – when we aren’t reaching out, neither do students.
We spoke about the usual excuses we gave for low turnout in elections and low attendance at events – students are busy, they’re apolitical, they don’t understand what their SU does, turnout is just low everywhere – and we discussed why these arguments simply don’t always work.
If we as a staff team aren’t making sure that students have the opportunities to learn about what their SU does for them, and what it has the potential to do for them if they engage, then it’s not that they won’t, it’s that they can’t.
These familiar explanations contain some truth, of course, but they tend to be treated as insurmountable odds that we can’t go up against, rather than prompts to look more closely at how our democratic systems are designed and experienced by students.
Better questions
That begs the question of what we should measure alongside turnout to see the impact of elections. Following the conference session, we decided to reframe that way of thinking.
Why look at suggesting new metrics at all, if we haven’t yet answered the questions that matter – questions like “do students understand where power sits in their SU?” and “can they see clear examples of participation leading to change?”
They aren’t easy questions, and I might not even be the best person to answer them, but they do open up new ways of working. They mean that we can start new projects and initiatives with one thing in mind – making sure that the work we do for students is clear, visible, and understandable by as many students as possible.
Elections still matter, turnout will always matter, but they can’t carry the weight of democratic evaluation alone when they seem to serve as an indicator of a larger problem.
If turnout tells us anything, it’s that the real question isn’t about whether students care – it’s about whether democracy has given them a reason to.
In a world where their voices and their votes seem to matter less and less to those elected, it’s no surprise that by the time the ballot opens students have long made up their minds about whether their participation will achieve what they want it to.
If turnout is a lagging indicator then our work needs to focus on everything that comes before it – not the voting week alone, but how democracy is lived, communicated, and made real all year.
