After the surprise of the Conservatives losing their majority in the June 2017 general election, people started looking for an explanation. One theory quickly came to prominence: Jeremy Corbyn had enthused previously disengaged young voters, who turned out in droves to vote Labour.
Certainly, Mr Corbyn appears to be popular with young people - he is often pictured surrounded by young supporters and that summer's Glastonbury Festival echoed to chants of "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn". Opinion polls lent weight to the idea - one polling organisation suggested that turnout among 18 to 24-year-olds went up by as much as 16 percentage points, another suggested an increase of 12 points.
But we now know there was no surge in youth turnout. Overall turnout did go up in 2017, but only by 2.5 percentage points.
Since 1964, the gold standard measure of electoral behaviour in Britain has been the British Election Study's face-to-face survey. Newly released results using this data show that there was very little change in turnout by age group between the 2015 and 2017 elections.
Younger voters were still much less likely to vote, older voters much more so. Among the youngest voters, the margin of error means that we cannot rule out a small increase - or decrease - in 2017.
That there was no surge in youth turnout should probably not be as surprising as it is. Everything we know about turnout suggests that voting is "sticky" - most people who vote in one election will go on to vote at subsequent elections, and most people who abstain will continue to do so. We also know that older people are more likely to vote than young people - something that has always been the case in Britain and other countries.
Labour was more popular among young people than old people in 2017 and its share of the youth vote did increase. But winning the support of more of the young people who vote is not the same as a surge in youth turnout. It is also worth pointing out that in 2017 Labour's popularity increased among all ages, except for those over 70.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-42747342
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