I thought i was all set to begin, i had everything planned then my first research supervisor meeting at 10am last Monday morning, changed everything.

The initial plan.

My initial research project Investigating How the Expansion of Voter Franchise in the 19th, and 20th Century Affected Candidacy Competition and Voter Turnout at the Constituency Level in Parliamentary Elections, and the Potential Effects of Votes at 16 on British Democracy" in which I would have first worked to improve my supervisor's constituency level dataset of UK general elections 1832-2024 by analysing, digitising and implementing historical electoral records.

Subsequently from the dataset, I was planning to investigate historical electoral reform i.e. universal sufferage and lowering the vote to 18 in 1969, affected political participation in terms of turnout and map that onto what could happen come 2029, if UK government proposals succeed to lower the voting age to 16 for the British Political landscape.

I was excited, had done a lot of preparation through  pre-readings and was ready to get stuck into statistical analysis.

10am meeting

It became immediately clear that my research project needed to change the minute, i explained it to my research supervisor. It had a number of fundemental problems including scope and there were going to be too many unaccounted variables tô map historical data onto the policy debate of votes at 16.
Dr Umit said i had two options cither focus on doing historical analysis into UK Parliamentary elections using the dataset or pivot to looking at doing more policy research on votes at 16.

I honestly felt down and admittently lost and a failure as i thought i was behind in my research. He set me the traget in the next week to explore the policy debate both political rhetoric and the media qnd the academic
debate

Solving the problem.

I spend the rest of Monday and all day Tuesday, relentlessly reading both the political and academic debates, trying to find some key rhetoric or argument that I could test through research i.e. young people would just vote the way their parents do. But although I could have went down that route, I didn't feel any excitement or passion going down that angle of research.

I then pivoted to looking at research into how it affected political participation i.e. turnout and longer term voting habits amongst young people in countries for example Scotland that had already introduced votes at 16, but felt that this area of research was quite saturated.

However whilst reading I did realise that there's a lot of research on the policy process but not so much outcomes, and at 2am in Trevelyan College library it clicked that I really wanted to research if since the introduction of votes at 16, do party political platforms change to cater to a young electorate?

This subsequently gave me direction and I started reading more to prepare for a literature review, expanding into areas like voting behaviour, effectiveness of party manifestos and framing analysis and group appeals. Which led to further refinement to now looking longitudinally and qualitatively at Scottish and Welsh devolved election to determine if policy outcomes are really effective. 

I ended up exceeding the goals set by my academic supervisor and the research is progressing well going into week 2.

Key Learnings

This experience taught me about resilience, that failing isn't failure, it is always an opportunity and that you must always adapt and be willing to change course to ensure the end objective is still achievable. These early learnings will make me a more resilient, well rounded and adaptable researcher and leader going forward.