A brilliantly researched article, leavened with just the right amount of wit, but not falling into the tempting journo's trap of self indulgently sacrificing substance whilst showing off your own wit. This confirms what I have strongly felt for the last 30 years or more (I am now 80 yrs old and have voted in every GE since I was able to). From memory, my voting record has been approximately 45% Labour, 40% LibDEm and 15% Conservative. I suspect I am not unusual in that quite often my vote has been motivated more by wanting to oust the incumbent Govt than by any genuine hope that the next lot would do much better. British democracy is not ''broken''- it has never been properly designed. It is a pseudo democracy, better than the USA by a very small margin, due to the presence of its 3rd, 4th and 5th parties, which serve as a smoke screen to mask the selfserving nature of the Blues and Reds, for whom anything other than FPTP is anathema. If the Guiness Book of Records had a category for the Most Disastrously Squandered Political Opportunity It would be surely awarded to Nick Clegg. In 2010 he had the Holy Grail of 3rd parties, a once in a century chance to go with ether Red or Blue. Naively, for a mere 3 or 4 seats he went with the arithmetic instead of for the respective parties' values. Not that Labour would necessarily have been much more sincere than Cameron, but they would not have trashed his aims so obscenely thoroughly and so quickly. The flagship prize of PR was never going to be granted. The vote was smuggled in alongside local council elections, with hardly any lengthy debates or public education about the pros and cons (in contrast with the later exhaustive Brexit campaigns). A travesty of democracy.
So if I'm still alive and compos mentis in 2029, who will I vote for? Whichever party seems most likely to bring about a hung parliament. Democracy is very messy and difficult. Dictatorships are much simpler to bring in and to maintain, as our American cousins are now realising. FPTP makes it even easier. So how does my voting record fit with my socio-economic, cultural and employment status? I'm from a working class family. My father was a painter/signwriter in factories and haulage companies, but was also a polymath, played 7 different musical instruments, wrote songs, painted portraits, landscapes and cartoons. I went to university totally free, worked 20 years in export sales (Low PCM) and so years in Mental Health NHS (Low PCM. What most determines people's voting? IMO it's their moral character, on the scale of selfishness or altruism. But that can't be easily statistically verified. Our alternating Uniparty is a joke.
Mildly off topic but are those BES questions from the 1950s?!
Seeking views on statements like 'Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards' when the internet is right there, littered with lies, porn, US shooting massacre videos, and AI baby-eating kittens (I made that up but no doubt someone will do it) is bizarrely quaint.
Another article, please, on how they come up with the statements and the intentions behind them. 🙂
This is a very interestingly argued article with good evidence for its points, but where it leaves me is pretty dissatisfied on the question of what these parties can do. Conservatives the answer seems obvious, they do have an ideological problem and its that they need to shift left economically to recapture lost voters. But Labour doesn't really seem to have the same problem. They're already ideologically in about the best spot they can be for the set of voters they can win with significant clusters all around their current spot and no other party close to these voters ideologically. Ought to be easy pickings then right?
Which means something is missing from this kind of analysis given their awful poll positions. And I've got two possibilities in mind for this. First, is ideology not covered in the questions you listed. The obvious point here is foreign policy. Post-Brexit EU relations, relations with Donald Trump, Russia-Ukraine, and Israel-Palestine all are pretty salient issues to lots of people that are going unmeasured here. Normally we are probably safe considering foreign policy a side show, but with major wars (one of which is a genocide), and massive changes to global trade occurring, foreign policy may play a big role in voter choices now.
The second option is just perceived competence. I think highly ideological people really spend a lot of time thinking about ideological coherence but there is a second question that is can a leader or party actually use the machinery of governance effectively to achieve its ideological aims (or even just ensure government functions properly). And perception may exist that Labour has incompetent leadership. That wouldn't be measured by these ideological questions.
So those two issues would be where I'd want to dig deeper. How much are people abandoning Labour over unmeasured ideological disputes vs perceptions of governing ability?
Very interesting. It makes sense that the easiest way to attract voters is to take them from the nearest parties (particularly the Lib Dems). But isn't it also important (even if much more difficult) to try to change the hearts and minds of more distant voters? I speak as someone who has no loyalty to any particular party, but is terrified by the rise of the far right. The only solution to that seems to be to attract people back towards the centre. Fighting for a larger share of the centrist vote feels a bit like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
The Four Yorkshiremen sketch predated Monty Python and originally featured Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman as well as John Cleese and Graham Chapman on At Last The 1948 Show (in 1967)
I wonder about treating the PMC as a single class. There is plenty of evidence that it is composed of two distinct groups (maybe with some overlap)
(1) largely public sector professionals - in health, admin, education and welfare) plus some private sector creatives
(2) mainly private sector managers plus public sector in hierarchical organisations (especially police)
If the two are disaggregated, as they often are in European research, you find very distinct attitudinal profiles. Aggregation of the two is therefore misleading.
If you look, say, at the Swedish Green and Left parties they score very heavily in group (1) whilst the Conservatives (aka Moderates) score very high on (2).
However, I recognise there may be problems gathering the relevant data
Isn't Labour's current obsession with trying to win back voters from Reform driven by electoral geography: namely that Reform is the biggest threat to Labour in the Red Wall, which Labour cannot win without (as December 2019 demonstrated)?
Reform preys upon people trapped in areas shorn of their original raison d'être (such as seaside towns devastated by cheap flights to the Med, or pit villages devastated by the end of coal mining in Britain) and it's the fault of Labour's most revered government (that led by Clement Attlee) that so many such people exist, as the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 introduced a NIMBY bias into British land use policy, which has prevented people there from moving to the big cities where economic opportunities are now concentrated.
Still doesn't make sense given the ideological distance. The only hope to actually win Reform voters would be to abandon the larger portion of the Labour base to the Lib Dems or the Greens. If the 2024 election taught Labour anything its that keeping reform and conservatives split is the best move. Doing a huge London housing building spree to attract in and give opportunities to Reform voters may not even work given the older ages of those voters and thus less appeal to employers. Still a good idea from a competent running of the government perspective but the main movers could just be younger migrants from abroad which doesn't directly help on votes for many years. Though ultimately ideology shifts (or at least the ideology captured in these questions), may not work. Greater perception of Labour competence however might as it could win back the nearby skeptics and possibly could shift people's ideologies. The question is how to achieve that? Which I admit is beyond me.
Correct that Labour won big in 2024 thanks to a split right-wing vote, but I don't see what power Labour has exactly to _keep_ it split!
It wouldn't surprise me if the election of Kemi Badenoch (a black female Diet Farage with minimal appeal compared to the full-fat alternative) as Conservative leader, was a case of the famously elderly and reactionary Conservative Party rank-and-file (ie the same people who inflicted Liz Truss on us) essentially euthanizing their own supposed party for Reform's benefit!
I suppose one idea (that I suspect Labour isn't bold/insane enough to try) would be to try to split Reform's vote by secretly supporting parties even further to the right (such as the new Advance UK, or the post-Farage UKIP): it feels to me a bit like when Netanyahu aided Hamas to discredit the Palestinian cause generally.
That concept does remind me of Hillary Clinton trying to help Donald Trump beat his republican rivals in the 2016 primaries because she figured he'd be easier to beat. So definitely a playing with fire approach. That might be a little more effective in the UK's multi-party system than the US 2 party one, but the consequences of it going wrong and a super far right government coming to power would be terrible (just like the US is experiencing now).
This is absolutely awesome, thanks. A couple of reflections:
1. It looks like Labour and LD coalitions are held together by broadly similar economic stances, but varying cultural positions. While Tories and Reform have the opposite profile; culturally-homogeneous, but economically diverse. Which makes complete sense given the right’s desire to dial up cultural divisions. Shows just how far the Tories have drifted from economic competence & a consistent standpoint.
2. Although the Lab-DK movers are much closer to the Labour loyalists’ position, do you think the Lab strategy is to essentially ‘get ahead’ of them, sheepdog-style, bringing them back into the fold, before they drift closer to the long-lost Reform defectors? Personally I think this is mad, given the gulf between the 2 groups, but it does feel like someone in Lab HQ is panicking that this group will be out of reach shortly.
And a technical question, if I may. What percentage of total variance do the 2 factors explain? I’m assuming that combined it’s very high (e.g. 75%+) but was just interested. And is there a significant third dimension that can explain the differences between LD and Lab? Thanks again!
Kind of interesting that Tories and Reform overlap and make up a very clear linear relationship between economic and cultural factors, and so do Labour, LDs, and Greens - just the sign of the correlation is reversed.
More culturally conservative people are more economically conservative among Labour/LD/Greens, and the opposite among Tory/Reform. Or to put it another way, there's a tradeoff between statist and libertarian forms of conservatism, but there's a spectrum of greater or lesser general radicalism on the left.
I think you're right about the source of that memo. What I'd call a once "sniffy" Blairite, who quite liked Cameron's early phase, and is now very Blue Labour and obsessed with AI.
Good analysis. But like many studies, it fails on one important point: it assumes that all workers have voting rights. Of course in most Western economies the working class comprises the bulk of immigrant workforce which is subject to taxation with no representation.
Question - do you have enough granularity in the data to look at the distribution of people of a given occupation type across the social/economic plane? E.g. maybe some sort of contours?
I'm asking because it would be interesting to see if the distribution of views amongst a given occupation level is actually multi-modal/made of reasonably distinct subsets (i.e. the subsets of each occupation voting for each party are semi-distinct subsets), or whether the distribution across the plane is much smoother/flatter, and voters are basically being hoovered up by the party that is nearest to where they sit in the plane.
It may well be that the sensibleness of a given electoral strategy depends on which of these 2 is the case.
Hopefully that makes some sense - happy to clarify if interested.
A brilliantly researched article, leavened with just the right amount of wit, but not falling into the tempting journo's trap of self indulgently sacrificing substance whilst showing off your own wit. This confirms what I have strongly felt for the last 30 years or more (I am now 80 yrs old and have voted in every GE since I was able to). From memory, my voting record has been approximately 45% Labour, 40% LibDEm and 15% Conservative. I suspect I am not unusual in that quite often my vote has been motivated more by wanting to oust the incumbent Govt than by any genuine hope that the next lot would do much better. British democracy is not ''broken''- it has never been properly designed. It is a pseudo democracy, better than the USA by a very small margin, due to the presence of its 3rd, 4th and 5th parties, which serve as a smoke screen to mask the selfserving nature of the Blues and Reds, for whom anything other than FPTP is anathema. If the Guiness Book of Records had a category for the Most Disastrously Squandered Political Opportunity It would be surely awarded to Nick Clegg. In 2010 he had the Holy Grail of 3rd parties, a once in a century chance to go with ether Red or Blue. Naively, for a mere 3 or 4 seats he went with the arithmetic instead of for the respective parties' values. Not that Labour would necessarily have been much more sincere than Cameron, but they would not have trashed his aims so obscenely thoroughly and so quickly. The flagship prize of PR was never going to be granted. The vote was smuggled in alongside local council elections, with hardly any lengthy debates or public education about the pros and cons (in contrast with the later exhaustive Brexit campaigns). A travesty of democracy.
So if I'm still alive and compos mentis in 2029, who will I vote for? Whichever party seems most likely to bring about a hung parliament. Democracy is very messy and difficult. Dictatorships are much simpler to bring in and to maintain, as our American cousins are now realising. FPTP makes it even easier. So how does my voting record fit with my socio-economic, cultural and employment status? I'm from a working class family. My father was a painter/signwriter in factories and haulage companies, but was also a polymath, played 7 different musical instruments, wrote songs, painted portraits, landscapes and cartoons. I went to university totally free, worked 20 years in export sales (Low PCM) and so years in Mental Health NHS (Low PCM. What most determines people's voting? IMO it's their moral character, on the scale of selfishness or altruism. But that can't be easily statistically verified. Our alternating Uniparty is a joke.
Mildly off topic but are those BES questions from the 1950s?!
Seeking views on statements like 'Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards' when the internet is right there, littered with lies, porn, US shooting massacre videos, and AI baby-eating kittens (I made that up but no doubt someone will do it) is bizarrely quaint.
Another article, please, on how they come up with the statements and the intentions behind them. 🙂
This is a very interestingly argued article with good evidence for its points, but where it leaves me is pretty dissatisfied on the question of what these parties can do. Conservatives the answer seems obvious, they do have an ideological problem and its that they need to shift left economically to recapture lost voters. But Labour doesn't really seem to have the same problem. They're already ideologically in about the best spot they can be for the set of voters they can win with significant clusters all around their current spot and no other party close to these voters ideologically. Ought to be easy pickings then right?
Which means something is missing from this kind of analysis given their awful poll positions. And I've got two possibilities in mind for this. First, is ideology not covered in the questions you listed. The obvious point here is foreign policy. Post-Brexit EU relations, relations with Donald Trump, Russia-Ukraine, and Israel-Palestine all are pretty salient issues to lots of people that are going unmeasured here. Normally we are probably safe considering foreign policy a side show, but with major wars (one of which is a genocide), and massive changes to global trade occurring, foreign policy may play a big role in voter choices now.
The second option is just perceived competence. I think highly ideological people really spend a lot of time thinking about ideological coherence but there is a second question that is can a leader or party actually use the machinery of governance effectively to achieve its ideological aims (or even just ensure government functions properly). And perception may exist that Labour has incompetent leadership. That wouldn't be measured by these ideological questions.
So those two issues would be where I'd want to dig deeper. How much are people abandoning Labour over unmeasured ideological disputes vs perceptions of governing ability?
Very interesting. It makes sense that the easiest way to attract voters is to take them from the nearest parties (particularly the Lib Dems). But isn't it also important (even if much more difficult) to try to change the hearts and minds of more distant voters? I speak as someone who has no loyalty to any particular party, but is terrified by the rise of the far right. The only solution to that seems to be to attract people back towards the centre. Fighting for a larger share of the centrist vote feels a bit like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
The Four Yorkshiremen sketch predated Monty Python and originally featured Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman as well as John Cleese and Graham Chapman on At Last The 1948 Show (in 1967)
I wonder about treating the PMC as a single class. There is plenty of evidence that it is composed of two distinct groups (maybe with some overlap)
(1) largely public sector professionals - in health, admin, education and welfare) plus some private sector creatives
(2) mainly private sector managers plus public sector in hierarchical organisations (especially police)
If the two are disaggregated, as they often are in European research, you find very distinct attitudinal profiles. Aggregation of the two is therefore misleading.
If you look, say, at the Swedish Green and Left parties they score very heavily in group (1) whilst the Conservatives (aka Moderates) score very high on (2).
However, I recognise there may be problems gathering the relevant data
Eric Shaw
Isn't Labour's current obsession with trying to win back voters from Reform driven by electoral geography: namely that Reform is the biggest threat to Labour in the Red Wall, which Labour cannot win without (as December 2019 demonstrated)?
Reform preys upon people trapped in areas shorn of their original raison d'être (such as seaside towns devastated by cheap flights to the Med, or pit villages devastated by the end of coal mining in Britain) and it's the fault of Labour's most revered government (that led by Clement Attlee) that so many such people exist, as the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 introduced a NIMBY bias into British land use policy, which has prevented people there from moving to the big cities where economic opportunities are now concentrated.
Still doesn't make sense given the ideological distance. The only hope to actually win Reform voters would be to abandon the larger portion of the Labour base to the Lib Dems or the Greens. If the 2024 election taught Labour anything its that keeping reform and conservatives split is the best move. Doing a huge London housing building spree to attract in and give opportunities to Reform voters may not even work given the older ages of those voters and thus less appeal to employers. Still a good idea from a competent running of the government perspective but the main movers could just be younger migrants from abroad which doesn't directly help on votes for many years. Though ultimately ideology shifts (or at least the ideology captured in these questions), may not work. Greater perception of Labour competence however might as it could win back the nearby skeptics and possibly could shift people's ideologies. The question is how to achieve that? Which I admit is beyond me.
Correct that Labour won big in 2024 thanks to a split right-wing vote, but I don't see what power Labour has exactly to _keep_ it split!
It wouldn't surprise me if the election of Kemi Badenoch (a black female Diet Farage with minimal appeal compared to the full-fat alternative) as Conservative leader, was a case of the famously elderly and reactionary Conservative Party rank-and-file (ie the same people who inflicted Liz Truss on us) essentially euthanizing their own supposed party for Reform's benefit!
I suppose one idea (that I suspect Labour isn't bold/insane enough to try) would be to try to split Reform's vote by secretly supporting parties even further to the right (such as the new Advance UK, or the post-Farage UKIP): it feels to me a bit like when Netanyahu aided Hamas to discredit the Palestinian cause generally.
That concept does remind me of Hillary Clinton trying to help Donald Trump beat his republican rivals in the 2016 primaries because she figured he'd be easier to beat. So definitely a playing with fire approach. That might be a little more effective in the UK's multi-party system than the US 2 party one, but the consequences of it going wrong and a super far right government coming to power would be terrible (just like the US is experiencing now).
This is absolutely awesome, thanks. A couple of reflections:
1. It looks like Labour and LD coalitions are held together by broadly similar economic stances, but varying cultural positions. While Tories and Reform have the opposite profile; culturally-homogeneous, but economically diverse. Which makes complete sense given the right’s desire to dial up cultural divisions. Shows just how far the Tories have drifted from economic competence & a consistent standpoint.
2. Although the Lab-DK movers are much closer to the Labour loyalists’ position, do you think the Lab strategy is to essentially ‘get ahead’ of them, sheepdog-style, bringing them back into the fold, before they drift closer to the long-lost Reform defectors? Personally I think this is mad, given the gulf between the 2 groups, but it does feel like someone in Lab HQ is panicking that this group will be out of reach shortly.
And a technical question, if I may. What percentage of total variance do the 2 factors explain? I’m assuming that combined it’s very high (e.g. 75%+) but was just interested. And is there a significant third dimension that can explain the differences between LD and Lab? Thanks again!
Kind of interesting that Tories and Reform overlap and make up a very clear linear relationship between economic and cultural factors, and so do Labour, LDs, and Greens - just the sign of the correlation is reversed.
More culturally conservative people are more economically conservative among Labour/LD/Greens, and the opposite among Tory/Reform. Or to put it another way, there's a tradeoff between statist and libertarian forms of conservatism, but there's a spectrum of greater or lesser general radicalism on the left.
I think you're right about the source of that memo. What I'd call a once "sniffy" Blairite, who quite liked Cameron's early phase, and is now very Blue Labour and obsessed with AI.
Hello Ben!
Pleasure to meet you, I’ve been on here about a week and I’m trying to meet new people.
I share history from historic books, with a philosophical look at how things used to be.
My latest work is on the Fabian’s.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jordannuttall/p/who-were-the-fabians?r=4f55i2&utm_medium=ios
Wonderful more of that Ben, please.
Hopefully Labour HQ comes to it senses, eventually
Ben, if there are enough datapoints in the BES data for Wales, what would Plaid's surge and the splitting up of the Labour 2024 vote look like?
Hi Ben - have you got a link to occupational group by constituency, please? Thanks. Antonia
Good analysis. But like many studies, it fails on one important point: it assumes that all workers have voting rights. Of course in most Western economies the working class comprises the bulk of immigrant workforce which is subject to taxation with no representation.
Very interesting analysis, nice one.
Question - do you have enough granularity in the data to look at the distribution of people of a given occupation type across the social/economic plane? E.g. maybe some sort of contours?
I'm asking because it would be interesting to see if the distribution of views amongst a given occupation level is actually multi-modal/made of reasonably distinct subsets (i.e. the subsets of each occupation voting for each party are semi-distinct subsets), or whether the distribution across the plane is much smoother/flatter, and voters are basically being hoovered up by the party that is nearest to where they sit in the plane.
It may well be that the sensibleness of a given electoral strategy depends on which of these 2 is the case.
Hopefully that makes some sense - happy to clarify if interested.