The real story on disengagement, as both the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Electoral Commission have pointed out in recent months, is that it is related to socio-economic status and age. Income, level of educational attainment, and type of employment are all strongly linked to voter participation rates. The higher the income a citizen enjoys, and the higher the educational qualifications attained, the more likely it is that he or she will turn out to vote.

In the British general election of May 2005, young people (those aged 18-25) were only half as likely to vote as older citizens (those aged 65 and over). More worryingly still, there is a clear "cohort effect": measured over three elections between 1992 and 2001, each body of voters, when grouped by year of birth, participates less than the group born a decade earlier.

What all this means is that the problem we face is not just declining participation overall, it is a rise in turnout inequality and an increasingly clear generational switch-off from formal politics.

From institutions to culture

Tackling this problem does require more responsive political institutions, as Adam Lent and the Power inquiry have argued, but it requires far more than that. We now need more creative thinking, in at least two areas.

The first relates to the political culture and effective promotion of the duty to vote. All institutions are organised representations of bias and the ippr believes that compulsory turnout at elections would be an institutional innovation capable of further establishing and supporting the civic duty to vote. The freedom to vote is not just any other freedom. The popular vote is the foundation-stone of legitimacy for all public institutions and is the freedom upon which all other freedoms may be said to rest.

We find it acceptable to have compulsion in other walks of life, such as jury duty in the courts or the legal requirement to educate our children. Is our democracy not valuable enough to warrant a similar level of backing? The ippr's work has been careful to link this proposal both to an option to vote for "none of the above" and to a call to rethink the electoral system. It would clearly be absurd to compel people to vote in constituencies where there was no chance that their vote could make a difference to the outcome.

As for Adam Lent's concern that "none of the above" might win, this would indeed be a sorry outcome: but the worry seems to ignore the fact that in many constituencies, in both general and local elections, turnout is so low that "none of the above" is already effectively winning. The difference in the current system is that some candidates, on the basis of the tiny portion of the electorate voting for them, can claim a legitimacy they ought not to have. Is Adam Lent arguing that this is a preferable state of affairs and if so, upon which democratic principle does he base his argument?

The second area where more creative thinking is required relates to the Power inquiry's greatest missed opportunity and highlights the area in which its partially correct diagnosis of the problem has not given birth to appropriately radical thinking on solutions. People do indeed perceive our current political institutions and politicians as largely ineffective and making those institutions more responsive must be a part of the solution.

But unless we are also sure that current institutions and mechanisms of accountability can be mapped against more of the important sites of power that shape people's lives, then more responsive institutions will be condemned to remain ineffective. The Power inquiry spent too much of its time covering well-trodden ground on responsive institutions and adding more of the same to the already considerable research into public attitudes. It didn't spend enough time thinking through the nature of power, mapping the unaccountable sites of its existence and use, and thinking radically about how to link decision-making venues more closely to affected interests.

It is this challenge, and that of building and further supporting a cultural climate of civic duty that extends into politics rather than seeking to bypass it, that remains most pressing. While it is true that compulsory turnout would do little to aid us in responding to the former problem, it could do much to help meet the latter. It is also the single most effective option available to reverse the inequality of participation that currently marks Britain's democracy.