Abstract
Party competition in Great Britain increasingly revolves around social or ‘cultural’ issues as much as it does around the economic issues that took centre stage when class was assumed to be dominant. We use data from surveys of members of parliament, party members and voters to explore how this shift has affected the internal coalitions of the Labour and Conservative Parties – and to provide a fresh test of ‘May’s Law’. We find a considerable disconnect between ‘neoliberal’ Conservative members of parliament and their more centrist voters on economic issues and similarly significant disagreement on cultural issues between socially liberal Labour members of parliament and their more authoritarian voters. We also find differences in both parties between parliamentarians and their grassroots members, albeit that these are much less pronounced. May’s Law, not for the first time, appears not to be borne out in reality.
Highlights
Party competition in Great Britain increasingly revolves around social or ‘cultural’ issues as much as it does around the economic issues that took centre stage when class was assumed to be dominant
Comparative discussion of the changing nature of party systems has tended to draw on cases where their fragmentation has led to new parties forming on this emerging cultural or values cleavage (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020), either through increasing support for radical right parties (Kriesi et al, 2006) or green and liberal parties (Alber, 2018)
This prompts a puzzle: what does the process of realignment do to the internal coalition of parties that survive a significant churn in their electoral support triggered by cultural issues?
Summary
Party competition in Great Britain increasingly revolves around social or ‘cultural’ issues as much as it does around the economic issues that took centre stage when class was assumed to be dominant. In the ‘Analysis’ section to follow, this article will first test the applicability of May’s Law of Curvilinear disparity – mapping our data on the social and economic values of MPs, party members (divided by their campaigning activity) and voters.
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