Government Approval

YouGov's daily voting intention figures today are CON 41%, LAB 37%, LDEM 15%. Government approval is at 41%, disapproval at 40%, giving a net value of just +1, the lowest it's been since the general election. There is a slow downwards trend in the net score, so I'd expect to see a negative rating sooner rather than later.

To look a bit closer at the approval ratings, below is a graph of approval ratings since the election. The grey line is the net figure for all voters, the blue amongst Tory voters, red Labour voters and gold Lib Dem voters. You can see approval amongst Tories is (unsurprisingly) high and steady. Approval amongst Lib Dem voters is less strong (it averages around 53% approval and 18% disapproval) and underneath all that bouncing about (that's because there are fewer Lib Dems, and a smaller sample is more volatile) is slowly declining. Finally Labour voters were initially only slightly negative as they gave the government the benefit of the doubt, but quickly became strongly negative - again, as one would expect.

So the main cause of the big decline from the high government approval ratings in the early days of the government is just Labour voters going from "don't know" to disapprove - a rather inevitable change. More significant is the slow decline since then. This has mostly been amongst Lib Dem voters - both the very gradual decline on the graph, but more important something that isn't shown on the graph - the change in the size of three groups that those lines represent. Lib Dem voters may be continuing to support the government, but at the same time the number of Lib Dems voters is in decline and that positive yellow line is representing fewer people.