I've voted Conservative for most of my life. At the last election I voted Labour for the first time in a General Election in my life, and did so with some enthusiasm. I am still broadly on board with the Government's direction of travel but very frustrated at the execution and poor quality oratory. The Conservatives are making progress on me considering them again but still have a long way to go. There are many reasons why I wouldn't consider Reform but by far the most salient is their lack of support for Ukraine. At the moment for me Defence has rocketed to the top of my salient issues and how Europe prepares to defend itself without US help is both time critical and existential. Of course keeping the populist right at bay across Europe is an important part of this since with the exception oh Meloni they are all at best soft on Putin and it is clear Russia is contributing money and social media propaganda to the populist right alongside Trump! I don't see how the left bloc can ignore the issues that have led to the rise of the populist right across the West. There is clearly something wrong when working class voters are shifting right and left parties are increasingly the parties of the educated elite. Your bubble charts show the situation in the UK is not as extreme as in the US but the direction of travel is clear. I don't believe the populist right's policies will work but the left and centre right need to develop realistic policies which will address the frustrations driving the rise of extreme parties.
> There are many reasons why I wouldn't consider Reform but by far the most salient is their lack of support for Ukraine. At the moment for me Defence has rocketed to the top of my salient issues and how Europe prepares to defend itself without US help is both time critical and existential.
I agree. I'm in the same position as you in that I think the whole issue of foreign and defence policy is of extreme importance right now.
I would never vote for Farage because I think he's a deliberate conscious traitor who wants to make us a vassal of the USA. He also wants Russia to conquer as much of eastern Europe as possible.
But I would never vote Tory of Labour either, because both of them have had a longstanding policy since the Suez Crisis in 1956 of being America's poodle.
We need to reverse this. We need to totally end dependence on the USA in defence industry, internet and computing. We also need to rejoin the EU and help to turn it into a strong military alliance. We need to do all this as quickly as possible.
I cannot imagine any of the parties going for this. Tory/Labour because they're too unimaginative to, Lib Dems because they're too wishy-washy, and Greens because they're too pacifist.
Although intra-bloc movement dominates inter-bloc movement in the short-term, over the medium-term movement between the blocs is more significant.
Using Mark Pack's Pollbase monthly average, we can see that at the last GE 18 months ago, in England the left-bloc led by 15 which rapidly fell; the cross-over point was in the first half of this year and since May the right-bloc has enjoyed a narrow lead, which is now perhaps 3-4 points (3.8 if I use the Election Maps average, which is more up to date).
So maximising your bloc share makes sense tactically - if the election were 6 months away. But politicians can shape opinion, not just following it, and building your bloc size has greater long-term benefits for achieving your policy goals, particularly if one assumes most individuals in the left bloc would rather any left-bloc party wins than a right-bloc party, and vice-versa.
It's strange that you assume some readers would place Labour in the right bloc (despite nationalising the railways, GB energy, radical workers rights legislation, VAT on private schools, the renters rights bill, deepening ties with the EU - including rejoining Erasmus+, 'mansion tax' etc) but raise no concerns about the Lib Dems being in the left bloc (despite their efforts to weaken workers rights, opposition to VAT on private schools, opposition to increased inheritance tax on wealthy farmers, opposition to the 'mansion tax' ... opposition to any policies to reduce inequality and raise funds for enhanced public services).Your idea of left politics seems to be limited to being positive about high levels of immigration and being strongly pro trans - do these really count for more than everything else?
I don’t think I mentioned trans more than maybe once in the past five posts so I’m a little surprised you brought it up! Anyway if you want to know what I call left and why please feel free to read the previous three posts that set out the precise questions used which I think will answer your concerns or at least provide you with the data for you to make your own mind up.
Thanks for your response. I raised immigration and trans rights because I was speculating about why you and other commentators often place the Lib Dems to the left of Labour even though Lib Dem economic policies are further to the right and they supported the Tories as they implemented deep austerity targeted at the poorest communities. So I was wondering whether for such commentators Lib Dem positions such as support for high immigration and being strongly pro trans (positions I regard as liberal rather than left-wing) somehow count for more than the Labour policies I mentioned above?
The way he places the parties ideologically is based on survey data showing the opinions held by voters for each party, NOT the stated policies of the parties. Very often they do not line up.
I've been doing a deep dive into the blocs via the 0-10 favourability scores in the BES 30 and converting them into party rankings 1 to 5. It's clear the right bloc is much more leaky (they'll go left for their 2nd preferences much more, where the left very rarely go right). This has major implications for ranked preference systems like AV or STV.
If Labour went to the Alternative Vote before the next election, the threat of a right-wing pact is immediately nullified, and Reform UK are absolutely hammered by the fact half the population would rank them 5th out of 5. If they need 50% to win a seat, then other parties fly past you to that mark very quickly as others are eliminated and their votes transferred.
This would be a terrific and radical tactic for Labour. A party with a big majority could get it done and cash in. But, the missing ingredient is courage from leadership. Same problem with EU/ customs union. A huge opportunity for Labour to be brave and seize the day. With due respect to Ben it needs a leader who doesn’t read Political Calculus and can spot an open goal by instinct.
Only thing is that Labour have tanked in favourability. AV and STV don't require any tactical voting, so people are free to vote for progressive parties they prefer. The projections from the May British Election Study for an AV election show Labour below 70 seats, and a likely Green - Lib Dem coalition. I'd love this personally, but how do you get Labour to pass this electoral reform if the only hope they have is tactical voting?
I keep being struck at the extent of the working age/retired divide - to the extent that it seems that many politicians seem stuck in a mythical 1950s class analysis, rather than looking at how people are now.
What does seem to have happened is that retired people who were once working class have moved substantially rightwards, but that people who are actually working are found mostly in the left block.
Part of this seems driven by poll classifications using groupings based on a person's previous occupation (as the widely used ABC1C2DE does), rather than having a group for pensioners.
People don't seem to have internalised that over 60% of hours worked are by people with higher education qualifications, with around 25% worked by those with nothing over GCSE (any level).
«poll classifications using groupings based on a person's previous occupation (as the widely used ABC1C2DE does)»
Those are *marketing* oriented (related to consumption patterns) groups, not classes.
«retired people who were once working class have moved substantially rightwards»
It is simple and traditional class analysis:
* Many current pensioners have only capital income as in from a defined benefit pension (an annuity) or a personal stock/bond based pension fund or from residential property. They are fully rentier "petty bourgeoisie".
* Many current workers have some holdings of stocks and own residential property as in "my house is my pension" and regard their income as employees as fairly secure and their assets as more important and regard themselves as present or future rentier "petty bourgeoisie". Political academics call that "class bilocation" IIRC.
* Some current workers are employed in their own business like a restaurant owner who is also the chef or a GP who is partner in the practice and they regard themselves mostly as small business owners and regard themselves as "petty bourgeoisie".
For most of these wages and salaries (at least those of other people) are a cost to be minimized and their property prices and rents and business profits are to be maximized.
In the 1970s a think-tank discovered two electoral patterns one of which obvious one quite surprising and important:
* Voters who owned housing, cars, stocks instead of renting, using public transport or having occupational pensions voted substantially more for the right than the left; obviously because most of those are richer than those who did not own that.
* This mostly applied also to voters who were lower class but owned however tiny a house, however modest a car, however small a stocks based pension account; this was highly surprising because it meant that they valued their interests as rentiers higher than their interests as workers.
So the governments of Thatcher and Blair and their successors started undermining rentals, public transport, occupational pensions to help thatcherite policies have electoral support.
Note: as time has passed it has become clear that in England property matters a lot more to voters than car or stock ownership.
Note: actually property ownership as such does not have that strong an effect in moving voting rightwards because it is property *profits* redistributed from the lower classes that have that effect: it would be foolish to put 100% of savings and borrow 5-6 times incomes on top of that to invest in a single asset just to "own their home"; unless it was politically guaranteed that it returned large profits (prices doubling every 7-10 years and rents doubling every 10-14 years).
Whilst I get the church roof repair trope, the Lib Dems are also characterised by an internationalist and constitutional change agenda (pro preferential and proportional voting). It has been in the interest of the Right bloc (and Labour) to minimise the constitutional issues. Whilst the leftish bloc are still hypnotised by the illusion of absolute power under FPTP, the R bloc can mostly divide and rule with impunity.
Very interesting, but this assumes that the "ownership" of particular issues is set in stone. Reform UK Ltd only "owns" immigration because other parties ignore the opinion of large numbers of voters. It is only in the last two decades that allowing net migration equivalent to an entire middle-ranking city every few months (eg 900,000 in the last year of Rishi Sunak) has become an orthodoxy, previously most of the Left bloc would have indignantly denied planning any such thing. Return to sanity and you shoot Reform's fox.
Not sure the left bloc planned 900,000 new people since they weren't in charge but point taken! In any case now we are already down to 200,000 and declining I expect some of the salience might change.
I don't know enough about French politics, or probably British politics for that matter, to back this up, but I can't shake the feeling that in terms of underlying public opinion we're France without realising it yet, with not two but three, equally-weighted blocs of voters: a hard left, split between the Labour left, the Greens and potentially Your Party; a hard right split between the Tory right and Reform; then a centre represented in the current Labour leadership but also comfortable with one nation Conservativism and moderate Lib Dems - but repelled by either extreme. And the critical electoral problem is that there are three coherent positions that will attract a solid 30% of votes, but very little that will deliver a strong mandate. And maybe that means we're as ungovernable as France, too?!
«And this keeps going until both parties converge on the position of the median voter and ta dah, we have a democracy based around moderate swing voters and parties that don’t really differ from one another…»
That is called usually "spatial voting" theory and the assumption is that voters carefully evaluate the set of policy proposals by parties and then choose the one that is the "nearest" to their preferred set of policy proposals.
For me that is a "performative" theory that is it is made in the hope that becomes true, but in reality things are very different, primarily because voters can only vote for candidates that are nominated and funded by some lobby, so their preferences do not matter much, as that is the real reason why all parties have converged on similar thatcherite policies, not because of the media voter.
But as to the secondary of voting behaviour my understanding is that:
* Voting (as politics in general) is based on interests.
* There are significant minorities of voters who vote "traditionally" that is they assume that a given party does and will represent their interests and vote for that party by habit "knowing" their policies will be good for them whatever they may be.
* There are significant blocks of "transactional" voters that have single interests that matter most to them and vote according to their single interest.
As to the latter point I think that notorious political strategist Grover Norquist summarized it well:
«<i>But on the vote-moving primary issue, everybody's got their foot in the center and they're not in conflict on anything. The guy who wants to spend all day counting his money, the guy who wants to spend all day fondling his weaponry, and the guy who wants to go to church all day may look at each other and say, "That's pretty weird, that's not what I would do with my spare time, but that does not threaten my ability to go to church, have my guns, have my money, have my properties, run by my business, home-school my kids.
[...] Spending's a problem because spending's not a primary vote-moving issue for anyone in the coalition. Everybody around the room wishes you'd spend less money. Don't raise my taxes; please spend less. Don't take my guns; please spend less. Leave my faith alone; please spend less. If you keep everybody happy on their primary issue and disappoint on a secondary issue, everybody grumbles … no one walks out the door. So the temptation for a Republican is to let that one slide. And I don't have the answer as to how we fix that. But it does explain how could it possibly be that everyone in the room wants something and doesn't end up getting it because it's not a vote-moving issue. [...]
Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are skeptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.” He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?</i>»
«And then, our job as conservatives is to wake up every day and say how do we make more of us and fewer of them. And the left's position is the same. I passed out a series of trends here; I'd be very interested in whether people think I'm missing stuff. I would suggest the biggest trend is the number of people who own shares of stock directly. We've gone from 17 percent of Americans owning stock to up over 50 percent of households. According to Mark Penn, two-thirds of voters in 2002, 2004, somebody who owns at least $5,000 worth of stock is 18 percent more Republican and less Democratic. African-American, no stock, 6 percent Republican; $5,000 worth of stock, 20 percent Republican. Every demographic group gets better with share ownership. Rich, poor, all colors, all genders, with the exception of women who earn more than $75,000 a year, who are already thoroughly Republican and don't get any better.
The growth of the investor class -- those 70 per cent of voters who own stock and are more opposed to taxes and regulations on business as a result -- is strengthening the conservative movement. More gun owners, fewer labor union members, more homeschoolers, more property owners and a dwindling number of FDR-era Democrats all strengthen the conservative movement versus the Democrats.»
In England all major parties have "sponsors" that make them target affluent "Middle England" voters as their core constituency and the "vote moving issue" of those voters is property prices and rents from which they derive often 30-50% of their after-tax income and pretty much the entirety of their wealth.
«“It was indeed at the diffusion of property that inter-war Tories aimed, as the pragmatic answer to the arrival of democracy and the challenge from Labour. There were even prophetic council house sales by local Tories in the drive to create voters with a Conservative political mentality. As a Tory councillor in Leeds defiantly told Labour opponents in 1926, ‘it is a good thing for people to buy their own houses. They turn Tory directly. We shall go on making Tories and you will be wiped out.’ There is much of the Party history of the twentieth century in that remark.”»
AFAIK polling indicates that satisfaction with with the NHS is at a record low. Given that, I would definitely not advise Labour to increase the salience of the NHS as an issue. After 18 months in power this government are held responsible for the slow ambulance response times, corridor care, and the tens of thousands of people who die each year due to long waits in A&E.
"In the left bloc the education divide within each parties is almost completely vertical... By contrast among voters in the right bloc, the educational divide is horizontal."
As a social scientist, I would look at these asymmetries and conclude that the scales are poorly calibrated. Specifically, the question bank appears to not go far enough in the conservative direction on social issues (vertical), and also not far enough in the liberal direction on economic issues (horizontal). That gives rise to the compression we see at the top and the left. There is no true scale here (units are arbitrary, eg some combination of likert responses), but the questions being used are doing a bad job differentiating the right on social politics and the left on economic politics. We need to add more far-left economic and far-right social questions.
I think you need to do better than simply look at a graph and tell me you don’t like it. Indeed you are welcome to look at all the previous posts, many of which use specific questions. The factors are constructed using the British Election Studies’ questions from their economic left right and authoritarian liberal banks. You may not like these questions or believe they cover the full possible scale of beliefs and I simply encourage you to produce your own analysis and let me know where I am wrong. Otherwise I don’t find this a particularly useful critique from a ‘social scientist’. Happy New Year!
Seems like an oddly aggressive reply. This wasn't a criticism of your analysis or even theirs -- it may even be that when the question banks were created, they were well-calibrated. But when a distribution is crowded along one edge of a spectrum instead of normally distributed, unless the range is inherently bounded, that's usually a sign of an improperly-calibrated measure. That's not a personal judgment, just basic measurement theory. Unless you designed this stuff yourself, it's not your problem to correct, it's theirs. But the interpretation does change when the measure is ill-calibrated.
OK, let me rephrase. These are group means and I have plotted the graph for readability so it's extrema are not the extrema of the underlying factor. The group means lie where they lie - that is not related to calibration of the questions, which are what they are (standard Likert scales, used in most surveys of such type) - but to where the means actually lie. One can tell rather little from these plots about the underlying distribution from the means since I have not plotted any information about the other moments of the distribution here. So your points on calibration are I'm afraid, ill-calibrated.
Hi Ben, interesting chart. I just wanted to clarify what you meant by “economically conservative” - do you mean economically liberal or do you mean the desire to keep the economic status quo?
«what you meant by “economically conservative” - do you mean economically liberal or do you mean the desire to keep the economic status quo?»
"liberal" in the UK used to mean "right-wing libertarian" that is "whig" and "keep the economic status quo" used to mean "right-wing rentierist" that is "tory". They used to be opposed at the time of the "Corn Laws" debates.
But both were and are anti-labour and it is that sense that "economically conservative" is usually used in the UK: for cutting government spending on the lower classes, for more affordable wages and pensions, for greater immigration of more workers and tenants, for more offshoring of labor intensive goods and services, for free investment abroad of capital, for higher taxes on consumption and lower taxes on income from ownership. Thatcherism and blairism in other words.
Thatcher herself was in part "tory" and in part "whig" and my description of "neoliberalism" is that it is the alliance of upper class finance "whigs" with "Middle England" property owning tories.
For more information this site has been publishing for a long time simplistic but useful charts of "social" vs. "economic" attitudes and their test might help you guess: https://www.politicalcompass.org/
Is the median voter theorem still relevant in encouraging efficiency within the opposition bloc? Ie one reason for a highly efficient left bloc in 2024 was because the Tories moved away from the the median voter. If the alternative bloc seems less scary then at the margin it probably encourages you to vote more with your ‘true preference’ and less tactically? Feels like Labour’s main goal for 2029 is to make the alternative bloc as scary as possible.
Also, is bloc politics mainly a feature when cultural issues are more salient? The charts seem to suggest that if you had economic issues dominating in salience you’d get more movement between blocs again, as happened in previous generations?
Absolutely nailed it on the heresthetics angle. The bit about Labour basically handing Reform their best issue while simultaneously splitting their own coalition is wild when you think about it strategically. Feels like Number 10 is still stuck in 2015 UKIP playbook mode when the game has totally changed. I worked on some local campaigns last cycle and the disconnect between what leadership thought would move voters versus what actually did was pretty stark.
Brillient, really insightful. Thx Ben. All I’d flag is the train coming toward the left bloc is the spiralling and, ultimately, unsustainable deficit growth. We simply will NOT be able to continue growing the State at the level most (I suspect) of the left bloc want to keep.
I've voted Conservative for most of my life. At the last election I voted Labour for the first time in a General Election in my life, and did so with some enthusiasm. I am still broadly on board with the Government's direction of travel but very frustrated at the execution and poor quality oratory. The Conservatives are making progress on me considering them again but still have a long way to go. There are many reasons why I wouldn't consider Reform but by far the most salient is their lack of support for Ukraine. At the moment for me Defence has rocketed to the top of my salient issues and how Europe prepares to defend itself without US help is both time critical and existential. Of course keeping the populist right at bay across Europe is an important part of this since with the exception oh Meloni they are all at best soft on Putin and it is clear Russia is contributing money and social media propaganda to the populist right alongside Trump! I don't see how the left bloc can ignore the issues that have led to the rise of the populist right across the West. There is clearly something wrong when working class voters are shifting right and left parties are increasingly the parties of the educated elite. Your bubble charts show the situation in the UK is not as extreme as in the US but the direction of travel is clear. I don't believe the populist right's policies will work but the left and centre right need to develop realistic policies which will address the frustrations driving the rise of extreme parties.
Thanks Alastair - it's really helpful to hear from people who don't fit into the bloc metric and what's important to them.
> There are many reasons why I wouldn't consider Reform but by far the most salient is their lack of support for Ukraine. At the moment for me Defence has rocketed to the top of my salient issues and how Europe prepares to defend itself without US help is both time critical and existential.
I agree. I'm in the same position as you in that I think the whole issue of foreign and defence policy is of extreme importance right now.
I would never vote for Farage because I think he's a deliberate conscious traitor who wants to make us a vassal of the USA. He also wants Russia to conquer as much of eastern Europe as possible.
But I would never vote Tory of Labour either, because both of them have had a longstanding policy since the Suez Crisis in 1956 of being America's poodle.
We need to reverse this. We need to totally end dependence on the USA in defence industry, internet and computing. We also need to rejoin the EU and help to turn it into a strong military alliance. We need to do all this as quickly as possible.
I cannot imagine any of the parties going for this. Tory/Labour because they're too unimaginative to, Lib Dems because they're too wishy-washy, and Greens because they're too pacifist.
Although intra-bloc movement dominates inter-bloc movement in the short-term, over the medium-term movement between the blocs is more significant.
Using Mark Pack's Pollbase monthly average, we can see that at the last GE 18 months ago, in England the left-bloc led by 15 which rapidly fell; the cross-over point was in the first half of this year and since May the right-bloc has enjoyed a narrow lead, which is now perhaps 3-4 points (3.8 if I use the Election Maps average, which is more up to date).
So maximising your bloc share makes sense tactically - if the election were 6 months away. But politicians can shape opinion, not just following it, and building your bloc size has greater long-term benefits for achieving your policy goals, particularly if one assumes most individuals in the left bloc would rather any left-bloc party wins than a right-bloc party, and vice-versa.
Good point Iain and one perhaps worth me returning to later to have a think about relative bloc size.
I may write something on it this weekend, time permitting!
Very much enjoyed your last post on the top and bottom percents which I think helps explain a lot of fairness attitudes on both left and right.
Thank you!
It's very hard to say what size the blocs are from voting intention as there will be voters tactically crossing the divide to keep out a party in their constituency that they really dislike. https://open.substack.com/pub/ewanhoyle/p/voting-intention-polls-are-failing?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2u1072
It's strange that you assume some readers would place Labour in the right bloc (despite nationalising the railways, GB energy, radical workers rights legislation, VAT on private schools, the renters rights bill, deepening ties with the EU - including rejoining Erasmus+, 'mansion tax' etc) but raise no concerns about the Lib Dems being in the left bloc (despite their efforts to weaken workers rights, opposition to VAT on private schools, opposition to increased inheritance tax on wealthy farmers, opposition to the 'mansion tax' ... opposition to any policies to reduce inequality and raise funds for enhanced public services).Your idea of left politics seems to be limited to being positive about high levels of immigration and being strongly pro trans - do these really count for more than everything else?
Oh plus also that was I think a fairly obvious joke.
I don’t think I mentioned trans more than maybe once in the past five posts so I’m a little surprised you brought it up! Anyway if you want to know what I call left and why please feel free to read the previous three posts that set out the precise questions used which I think will answer your concerns or at least provide you with the data for you to make your own mind up.
Thanks for your response. I raised immigration and trans rights because I was speculating about why you and other commentators often place the Lib Dems to the left of Labour even though Lib Dem economic policies are further to the right and they supported the Tories as they implemented deep austerity targeted at the poorest communities. So I was wondering whether for such commentators Lib Dem positions such as support for high immigration and being strongly pro trans (positions I regard as liberal rather than left-wing) somehow count for more than the Labour policies I mentioned above?
The way he places the parties ideologically is based on survey data showing the opinions held by voters for each party, NOT the stated policies of the parties. Very often they do not line up.
No one else has done it so I’ll acknowledge that the opening line of this is So Here We Are.
I've been doing a deep dive into the blocs via the 0-10 favourability scores in the BES 30 and converting them into party rankings 1 to 5. It's clear the right bloc is much more leaky (they'll go left for their 2nd preferences much more, where the left very rarely go right). This has major implications for ranked preference systems like AV or STV.
If Labour went to the Alternative Vote before the next election, the threat of a right-wing pact is immediately nullified, and Reform UK are absolutely hammered by the fact half the population would rank them 5th out of 5. If they need 50% to win a seat, then other parties fly past you to that mark very quickly as others are eliminated and their votes transferred.
This would be a terrific and radical tactic for Labour. A party with a big majority could get it done and cash in. But, the missing ingredient is courage from leadership. Same problem with EU/ customs union. A huge opportunity for Labour to be brave and seize the day. With due respect to Ben it needs a leader who doesn’t read Political Calculus and can spot an open goal by instinct.
Only thing is that Labour have tanked in favourability. AV and STV don't require any tactical voting, so people are free to vote for progressive parties they prefer. The projections from the May British Election Study for an AV election show Labour below 70 seats, and a likely Green - Lib Dem coalition. I'd love this personally, but how do you get Labour to pass this electoral reform if the only hope they have is tactical voting?
I keep being struck at the extent of the working age/retired divide - to the extent that it seems that many politicians seem stuck in a mythical 1950s class analysis, rather than looking at how people are now.
What does seem to have happened is that retired people who were once working class have moved substantially rightwards, but that people who are actually working are found mostly in the left block.
Part of this seems driven by poll classifications using groupings based on a person's previous occupation (as the widely used ABC1C2DE does), rather than having a group for pensioners.
People don't seem to have internalised that over 60% of hours worked are by people with higher education qualifications, with around 25% worked by those with nothing over GCSE (any level).
«poll classifications using groupings based on a person's previous occupation (as the widely used ABC1C2DE does)»
Those are *marketing* oriented (related to consumption patterns) groups, not classes.
«retired people who were once working class have moved substantially rightwards»
It is simple and traditional class analysis:
* Many current pensioners have only capital income as in from a defined benefit pension (an annuity) or a personal stock/bond based pension fund or from residential property. They are fully rentier "petty bourgeoisie".
* Many current workers have some holdings of stocks and own residential property as in "my house is my pension" and regard their income as employees as fairly secure and their assets as more important and regard themselves as present or future rentier "petty bourgeoisie". Political academics call that "class bilocation" IIRC.
* Some current workers are employed in their own business like a restaurant owner who is also the chef or a GP who is partner in the practice and they regard themselves mostly as small business owners and regard themselves as "petty bourgeoisie".
For most of these wages and salaries (at least those of other people) are a cost to be minimized and their property prices and rents and business profits are to be maximized.
In the 1970s a think-tank discovered two electoral patterns one of which obvious one quite surprising and important:
* Voters who owned housing, cars, stocks instead of renting, using public transport or having occupational pensions voted substantially more for the right than the left; obviously because most of those are richer than those who did not own that.
* This mostly applied also to voters who were lower class but owned however tiny a house, however modest a car, however small a stocks based pension account; this was highly surprising because it meant that they valued their interests as rentiers higher than their interests as workers.
So the governments of Thatcher and Blair and their successors started undermining rentals, public transport, occupational pensions to help thatcherite policies have electoral support.
Note: as time has passed it has become clear that in England property matters a lot more to voters than car or stock ownership.
Note: actually property ownership as such does not have that strong an effect in moving voting rightwards because it is property *profits* redistributed from the lower classes that have that effect: it would be foolish to put 100% of savings and borrow 5-6 times incomes on top of that to invest in a single asset just to "own their home"; unless it was politically guaranteed that it returned large profits (prices doubling every 7-10 years and rents doubling every 10-14 years).
Great piece, and I find the bubbles fascinating.
Whilst I get the church roof repair trope, the Lib Dems are also characterised by an internationalist and constitutional change agenda (pro preferential and proportional voting). It has been in the interest of the Right bloc (and Labour) to minimise the constitutional issues. Whilst the leftish bloc are still hypnotised by the illusion of absolute power under FPTP, the R bloc can mostly divide and rule with impunity.
Very interesting, but this assumes that the "ownership" of particular issues is set in stone. Reform UK Ltd only "owns" immigration because other parties ignore the opinion of large numbers of voters. It is only in the last two decades that allowing net migration equivalent to an entire middle-ranking city every few months (eg 900,000 in the last year of Rishi Sunak) has become an orthodoxy, previously most of the Left bloc would have indignantly denied planning any such thing. Return to sanity and you shoot Reform's fox.
Not sure the left bloc planned 900,000 new people since they weren't in charge but point taken! In any case now we are already down to 200,000 and declining I expect some of the salience might change.
I don't know enough about French politics, or probably British politics for that matter, to back this up, but I can't shake the feeling that in terms of underlying public opinion we're France without realising it yet, with not two but three, equally-weighted blocs of voters: a hard left, split between the Labour left, the Greens and potentially Your Party; a hard right split between the Tory right and Reform; then a centre represented in the current Labour leadership but also comfortable with one nation Conservativism and moderate Lib Dems - but repelled by either extreme. And the critical electoral problem is that there are three coherent positions that will attract a solid 30% of votes, but very little that will deliver a strong mandate. And maybe that means we're as ungovernable as France, too?!
«And this keeps going until both parties converge on the position of the median voter and ta dah, we have a democracy based around moderate swing voters and parties that don’t really differ from one another…»
That is called usually "spatial voting" theory and the assumption is that voters carefully evaluate the set of policy proposals by parties and then choose the one that is the "nearest" to their preferred set of policy proposals.
For me that is a "performative" theory that is it is made in the hope that becomes true, but in reality things are very different, primarily because voters can only vote for candidates that are nominated and funded by some lobby, so their preferences do not matter much, as that is the real reason why all parties have converged on similar thatcherite policies, not because of the media voter.
But as to the secondary of voting behaviour my understanding is that:
* Voting (as politics in general) is based on interests.
* There are significant minorities of voters who vote "traditionally" that is they assume that a given party does and will represent their interests and vote for that party by habit "knowing" their policies will be good for them whatever they may be.
* There are significant blocks of "transactional" voters that have single interests that matter most to them and vote according to their single interest.
As to the latter point I think that notorious political strategist Grover Norquist summarized it well:
http://www.prospect.org/article/world-according-grover
«<i>But on the vote-moving primary issue, everybody's got their foot in the center and they're not in conflict on anything. The guy who wants to spend all day counting his money, the guy who wants to spend all day fondling his weaponry, and the guy who wants to go to church all day may look at each other and say, "That's pretty weird, that's not what I would do with my spare time, but that does not threaten my ability to go to church, have my guns, have my money, have my properties, run by my business, home-school my kids.
[...] Spending's a problem because spending's not a primary vote-moving issue for anyone in the coalition. Everybody around the room wishes you'd spend less money. Don't raise my taxes; please spend less. Don't take my guns; please spend less. Leave my faith alone; please spend less. If you keep everybody happy on their primary issue and disappoint on a secondary issue, everybody grumbles … no one walks out the door. So the temptation for a Republican is to let that one slide. And I don't have the answer as to how we fix that. But it does explain how could it possibly be that everyone in the room wants something and doesn't end up getting it because it's not a vote-moving issue. [...]
Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are skeptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.” He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?</i>»
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0903/0903norquistinterview.htm
«And then, our job as conservatives is to wake up every day and say how do we make more of us and fewer of them. And the left's position is the same. I passed out a series of trends here; I'd be very interested in whether people think I'm missing stuff. I would suggest the biggest trend is the number of people who own shares of stock directly. We've gone from 17 percent of Americans owning stock to up over 50 percent of households. According to Mark Penn, two-thirds of voters in 2002, 2004, somebody who owns at least $5,000 worth of stock is 18 percent more Republican and less Democratic. African-American, no stock, 6 percent Republican; $5,000 worth of stock, 20 percent Republican. Every demographic group gets better with share ownership. Rich, poor, all colors, all genders, with the exception of women who earn more than $75,000 a year, who are already thoroughly Republican and don't get any better.
The growth of the investor class -- those 70 per cent of voters who own stock and are more opposed to taxes and regulations on business as a result -- is strengthening the conservative movement. More gun owners, fewer labor union members, more homeschoolers, more property owners and a dwindling number of FDR-era Democrats all strengthen the conservative movement versus the Democrats.»
In England all major parties have "sponsors" that make them target affluent "Middle England" voters as their core constituency and the "vote moving issue" of those voters is property prices and rents from which they derive often 30-50% of their after-tax income and pretty much the entirety of their wealth.
http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2014/03/how-thatcher-sold-council-houses-and-created-a-new-generation-of-property-owners.html
«“It was indeed at the diffusion of property that inter-war Tories aimed, as the pragmatic answer to the arrival of democracy and the challenge from Labour. There were even prophetic council house sales by local Tories in the drive to create voters with a Conservative political mentality. As a Tory councillor in Leeds defiantly told Labour opponents in 1926, ‘it is a good thing for people to buy their own houses. They turn Tory directly. We shall go on making Tories and you will be wiped out.’ There is much of the Party history of the twentieth century in that remark.”»
AFAIK polling indicates that satisfaction with with the NHS is at a record low. Given that, I would definitely not advise Labour to increase the salience of the NHS as an issue. After 18 months in power this government are held responsible for the slow ambulance response times, corridor care, and the tens of thousands of people who die each year due to long waits in A&E.
"In the left bloc the education divide within each parties is almost completely vertical... By contrast among voters in the right bloc, the educational divide is horizontal."
As a social scientist, I would look at these asymmetries and conclude that the scales are poorly calibrated. Specifically, the question bank appears to not go far enough in the conservative direction on social issues (vertical), and also not far enough in the liberal direction on economic issues (horizontal). That gives rise to the compression we see at the top and the left. There is no true scale here (units are arbitrary, eg some combination of likert responses), but the questions being used are doing a bad job differentiating the right on social politics and the left on economic politics. We need to add more far-left economic and far-right social questions.
I think you need to do better than simply look at a graph and tell me you don’t like it. Indeed you are welcome to look at all the previous posts, many of which use specific questions. The factors are constructed using the British Election Studies’ questions from their economic left right and authoritarian liberal banks. You may not like these questions or believe they cover the full possible scale of beliefs and I simply encourage you to produce your own analysis and let me know where I am wrong. Otherwise I don’t find this a particularly useful critique from a ‘social scientist’. Happy New Year!
Seems like an oddly aggressive reply. This wasn't a criticism of your analysis or even theirs -- it may even be that when the question banks were created, they were well-calibrated. But when a distribution is crowded along one edge of a spectrum instead of normally distributed, unless the range is inherently bounded, that's usually a sign of an improperly-calibrated measure. That's not a personal judgment, just basic measurement theory. Unless you designed this stuff yourself, it's not your problem to correct, it's theirs. But the interpretation does change when the measure is ill-calibrated.
OK, let me rephrase. These are group means and I have plotted the graph for readability so it's extrema are not the extrema of the underlying factor. The group means lie where they lie - that is not related to calibration of the questions, which are what they are (standard Likert scales, used in most surveys of such type) - but to where the means actually lie. One can tell rather little from these plots about the underlying distribution from the means since I have not plotted any information about the other moments of the distribution here. So your points on calibration are I'm afraid, ill-calibrated.
Hi Ben, interesting chart. I just wanted to clarify what you meant by “economically conservative” - do you mean economically liberal or do you mean the desire to keep the economic status quo?
«what you meant by “economically conservative” - do you mean economically liberal or do you mean the desire to keep the economic status quo?»
"liberal" in the UK used to mean "right-wing libertarian" that is "whig" and "keep the economic status quo" used to mean "right-wing rentierist" that is "tory". They used to be opposed at the time of the "Corn Laws" debates.
But both were and are anti-labour and it is that sense that "economically conservative" is usually used in the UK: for cutting government spending on the lower classes, for more affordable wages and pensions, for greater immigration of more workers and tenants, for more offshoring of labor intensive goods and services, for free investment abroad of capital, for higher taxes on consumption and lower taxes on income from ownership. Thatcherism and blairism in other words.
Thatcher herself was in part "tory" and in part "whig" and my description of "neoliberalism" is that it is the alliance of upper class finance "whigs" with "Middle England" property owning tories.
For more information this site has been publishing for a long time simplistic but useful charts of "social" vs. "economic" attitudes and their test might help you guess: https://www.politicalcompass.org/
Really interesting article.
Is the median voter theorem still relevant in encouraging efficiency within the opposition bloc? Ie one reason for a highly efficient left bloc in 2024 was because the Tories moved away from the the median voter. If the alternative bloc seems less scary then at the margin it probably encourages you to vote more with your ‘true preference’ and less tactically? Feels like Labour’s main goal for 2029 is to make the alternative bloc as scary as possible.
Also, is bloc politics mainly a feature when cultural issues are more salient? The charts seem to suggest that if you had economic issues dominating in salience you’d get more movement between blocs again, as happened in previous generations?
Absolutely nailed it on the heresthetics angle. The bit about Labour basically handing Reform their best issue while simultaneously splitting their own coalition is wild when you think about it strategically. Feels like Number 10 is still stuck in 2015 UKIP playbook mode when the game has totally changed. I worked on some local campaigns last cycle and the disconnect between what leadership thought would move voters versus what actually did was pretty stark.
Brillient, really insightful. Thx Ben. All I’d flag is the train coming toward the left bloc is the spiralling and, ultimately, unsustainable deficit growth. We simply will NOT be able to continue growing the State at the level most (I suspect) of the left bloc want to keep.
Somethings gonna give…..it’s in the maths!