The UK Election: 4. Why Do People Vote the Way They Do?

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Hello and welcome to Understand the UK Election, your essential guide to the general election.

I'm Adam Fleming.

My day job is presenting the BBC's daily news podcast newscast, which you can get on BBC Sounds.

I've been covering elections as a professional journalist since 2005, meaning this is my sixth campaign that I've watched unfold in minute detail.

And every time, there's always been a target voter that all the politicians are trying to win over, whether it is Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman, or Workington Man, which was the person at the last election who I think lived in the northwest of England and went to rugby league matches, and everyone wanted to get him.

I've always been a little bit sceptical of these labels, but the politicians aren't.

They do use them.

And actually, you can look at people's people's backgrounds and where they live and what level of education they've got, their gender, what they do for a job.

And it does tell you something about how they might vote come general election time.

So that is the subject we're going to drill into on this episode.

And the person who's going to help me understand that is Jane Green, who is director of the Nuffield Politics Research Centre at Oxford University.

She's also co-director of the British Election Study, and she is president of the British Polling Council.

Hello Jane.

Hello, thanks for having me.

That's a lot of jobs.

Yes, quite a few hats.

And also a lot of election related jobs.

I'm busy.

Right.

So first of all, the last time we had a general election in the UK, 2019, that was the Brexit election, wasn't it?

Yeah, it absolutely was.

This was the election where, you know, it was kind of resolving the stalemate in parliament.

So it wasn't just the issue of Brexit.

It was also, you know, nobody could move on.

I mean, things were just kind of stuck.

But December 2019 was very quickly followed, of course, by the COVID-19 pandemic.

So what you see in British Election Study data, the top issues of concerned people, Brexit beforehand, and then very, very rapidly replaced by COVID.

And then

just after that, you know, rapidly replaced again by the economy.

Okay, loads of things to unpack there.

Just in terms of the electoral timeline we've had, we had local elections in large parts of England in May.

Yeah.

What did that tell us about where people are?

Yeah, so we've had obviously local elections just recently.

Also, last year told a very, very similar story.

And this was really about anti-conservative sentiment.

And it backed up everything we're seeing in survey data, in our survey data, in opinion poll data.

You know, a very, very strong kind of desire to get rid of conservatives locally, increase tactical voting.

But also in local elections, and this has become a little bit more kind of true over time, that you start to see people changing how they vote in local elections compared to how they vote in general elections, and therefore seeing minor parties doing better in local elections.

And so, this is one of the reasons Labour's vote wasn't quite as bullish as the Conservative vote was down, and that's because people were voting more for independence, for the Lib Dems, the Greens, and so on.

And then, there were also some crumbs of comfort, I think, for the Conservatives in that Reform UK, which is kind of the threat from the right, weren't making those sort of inroads because they just didn't have the local machine, I think, probably the key reason available to them.

So I think on the basis of that, there's, you know, perhaps they thought, right, let's jump now because that's one of the things in their favor right now.

Okay, so there's all these undercurrents going on.

I just wonder if we could just boil this down really simply to what is the list of issues that people are thinking about at this election.

Yeah, we can.

So I think it's the economy, it's health, it's housing, it's immigration.

Immigration is dividing people now in terms of whether it's important.

So you're seeing, you know, reform voters and conservative voters care more about immigration.

I guess if I could add one extra thing, it's not an issue, but it's just a sense of being fed up and disillusioned and distrusting and angry.

I don't think anyone who gets voted in really cares too much.

I just hope someone gets in who actually does what they say they're going to do.

I just hope that the right person gets in and that they put the right policies up and good luck to them because we certainly need some changes.

It's the sentiment that's behind all of this as well, because it's one of the things that helps us understand, well, people have said, well, it's not 1997 because the Labour Party now under Kierstama doesn't have anywhere near the groundswell of support that Tony Blair had in 1997.

It's like, well, yeah, but everything's lower.

sort of liking for the parties is lower.

Trust in all the parties is lower.

You know, we're in that kind of context where I think cutting through with those issues, messages on those issues, you know, is going to be harder.

If I introduce you to a random person, can you use all your cephalological knowledge and understanding and intuition to basically predict how that person's going to vote?

You'd have an inkling.

And that's because, you know, if you look at the demographics that matter, you think of age, think of educational attainment level,

hugely important because of the relationships that we've talked about.

You perhaps, you know, know a bit about where they live and a little bit about their occupational background, and you'd have a probability that would probably give you a decent shot.

And is there one factor out of all of those that is the real decider?

The relationship of age and education to political choice just still is incredibly strong.

Younger voters are much more likely to vote on the left now, and older voters are much more likely to vote on the right.

So that would be Conservatives and Reform UK or Brexit Party or UKIP before.

But what's changed is the average age at which you start voting Conservatives has gone up and up and up because essentially the more people are voting or saying they want to vote for the Labour Party.

But the relationship is is really strong.

Now, the reason and education, educational attainment is also really important, but the reason those two things, I think of them as kind of mixed up, is that there's a big generational story here.

So there's lots of older voters, older people who would today have gone to university, but they didn't have that opportunity.

They didn't need to have that opportunity either to get on the housing ladder or to get a good job that...

gave them good prospects.

And so more younger people are going to university than ever before.

And so therefore, the relationship with Asian education is pretty inseparable.

And it's also tied up with these kind of values differences.

There's where you stand on sort of social conservatism or more liberal attitudes, more concerned about immigration, more comfortable with immigration, more in favour of leave, more in favour of remain.

In all these factors, we haven't talked about gender.

What does the role of gender play in people's political decisions?

Traditionally, in the UK, we haven't had large gender divides, but they've started to become more apparent.

So, women being more likely to vote on the left and men being more likely to vote on the right.

And you saw that particularly for support for UKIP and then the parties that have followed.

And that's a very consistent pattern in looking at the radical right and populist parties across the world.

So, younger women were the ones that were starting to display this divergence the most, with younger men still being more leaning towards the right.

And there's loads of fascinating potential reasons for that, one of which was, you know, reacting to austerity in the early days and then being more likely to vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in 2017.

This was younger women.

It could be quite significant going into this election too.

And what about ethnicity and race?

Because

we're in the world where we have an Asian prime minister,

but no one really talks about it because it just doesn't feel like a big deal.

Yeah.

I'm just wondering if ethnicity is a deal when it comes to working out how people vote.

Yeah, so it's a factor, but it's really important, obviously, to remember that all of those other factors don't go away.

So, if you're looking at voters from different ethnic minorities, their age and their educational attainment and all those other things are still going to matter too.

So, it's not kind of a blanket relationship or blanket statement that we make, but the relationship is very consistently has been that ethnic minority voters in the UK are more likely to vote for the Labour Party.

And that support has started to wane a little bit recently in some survey data.

We don't have the most, you know, really, really, really robust data to do this really well.

And that was really, really expensive to do.

Obviously, running surveys in different languages would be absolutely crucial to doing this, as well as making sure that different groups are really well represented and able to participate in surveys.

So I'm always really careful.

And what we're, you know, in making that kind of distinction between ethnic minorities, you know, obviously there's huge differences between minorities that I'm glossing over by saying that that's partly because of the data limitations.

And this is going to be be a really tricky question, but do we know the effect of how a political party kind of looks, as in who they've chosen as the leader, what kind of person that is, the lineup of the top team?

Do people want to see a political party that looks like them and their family and their mates?

Yeah, yeah.

So the effect in an election would be really difficult to tell.

But there is a large body of evidence that shows that we do like to see people in our image.

And one of the reasons that we do that is, of course, it's a sort of shortcut for saying, well, that person might share my values.

They might understand me.

This isn't just important if we think about race or ethnicity.

It's also important on gender.

It's also important that many working-class voters don't see many working-class MPs in the Labour Party anymore.

So that kind of symbolic representation, you know, like, is a very important part of politics.

Narrowing it down to, and that has made a difference because Rishi Sunak is from an ethnic minority, that's much harder.

I notice that every election, there's an archetypal figure that everyone appears to be after, whether it's Mondeo man

or Worcester Woman, these almost

quite cartoonish labels.

What do you think about that as a concept?

So this is where we sort of bring marketing into politics, isn't it?

So marketing segmentation, where you think either about what's your kind of swing voter.

Swing meaning that they could go in the other direction.

Well, they're all the swing applies everywhere.

But if you believe now that Labour is 15% points ahead in the polls that's going to put you somewhere on a map where you're looking at constituencies where roughly speaking this is where the Labour Party is going to start to be making gains.

So you get these kinds of archetypal places that really are they are the places you'll watch out for the night and you think okay right we're there.

So if you think about those archetypal people those are also the kinds of people that might be on the cusp, almost as likely to vote Labour as they are conservative.

We just think of the two-party race.

So I was talking just now about how the average conservative voters become older.

So you might say, okay, so in your mind's eye, the person who's on that kind of cut point might be 60, 65, something like that.

So then you're thinking about, you know, a pensioner who's wavering on, you know, this, that, and the other.

And this is where these archetypes come from.

Or we might look at women who are displaying more uncertainty about how they're going to vote.

You know, we end up with Worcester women who still needs to decide between her choices and and therefore could be the kind of person that could decide the election.

And so you start getting a bit of a caricature, a bit of a stereotype, but nevertheless, you know, something that gives you in your mind a way of thinking about different preferences, different behaviors, different kinds of habits.

So these things, you know, they are, you know, they're fun and they're interesting.

And sometimes, sometimes there's a really nice way of capturing

the quintessential people that might decide the election.

Well, that's the thing.

Like these things seem a little bit ridiculous, but actually they exist because they're a useful way of thinking about these things like Mondeo Man Tony Blair had to win over Mondeo man to win and he didn't and that was the kind of the centrist

the centrist dads of their day centrist dads of their day but also people who could afford a Mondeo you know so one of the big transformations the big transformation that Tony Blair building on successes you know achieved for the Labour Party was putting it back more in the political centre focusing then on economic competence and also you know

essentially allaying the fears that the Labour Party was kind of under the control of the unions and everything else.

So Mondeo man was actually kind of interesting because this was somebody who was doing probably better, owned their home, was working and so on and so forth.

And that man polishing his car was clear.

His instincts were to get on in life.

And he thought our instincts were to stop him.

But that was never our history or our purpose.

Also, can you you still get them on Deo?

I don't.

I'm just thinking for the younger listeners, they're wondering what's a Monday.

It is a Monday.

It was a family car.

It was a brand of Ford.

It was a family car.

It was a staple, nice family car.

Quite boxy.

I remember one from 2001, which was Pebble Dash Person, and I just think that's horrible.

Personally.

Who was a Pebble Dash person?

Someone who lived in a Pebble Dash house.

Right.

But again, that's kind of signalling something about class, isn't it?

It's about something about social class.

And we've talked a lot about things that aren't to do with social class.

Social class obviously being something that, you know, we kind of think about it through occupational experience and which job you do and maybe what job your parents did to some degree as well.

But this is what that's about, isn't it?

Well, Jane, thank you very much.

Do you want to come back and talk about polling in a future episode?

That sounds good to me.

And that's all for this episode.

Next time, we'll be looking at how voting actually works and how many people turn up to do it.

And you can find more episodes on BBC Sounds.

Just search understand the UK election.

And if you would like to keep up to date with the day-to-day blow-by-blow news from the campaign trail, then you can listen to my other podcast, Newscast.

See you again soon.

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