Seeking Evidence for a Welsh Progressive Consensus: Party Positioning in the 2016 National Assembly for Wales Election

Abstract

This article provides a detailed analysis of the policy positions advocated by the five political parties that won seats in the 2016 elections to the National Assembly for Wales (Welsh Labour; Plaid Cymru; the Welsh Conservatives; United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Welsh Liberal Democrats). It takes advantage of a unique dataset of party positions and justifications created for a Voter Advice Application website that ran during the election campaign: www.wales.electioncompass.org. The data collected reflects the responses of senior policy officers within each party to a series of 35 policy questions. This dataset is used to estimate the extent of party disagreement across each policy question as well as to create a matrix of inter-party similarity. These quantitative findings are supplemented by a discussion of the positional justifications proposed by the parties to the project.