Beyond bread and butter: Where the British public fall on social issues
The 2019 election saw unprecedented levels of volatility in British politics. Brexit cut across party lines and traditional voting patterns, culminating in the 2019 election and a sizable Conservative majority to ‘get Brexit done’. Journalists and academics have hailed this as evidence that social issues are becoming ever more important in British elections. Where Labour and the Conservatives once competed on questions of economic management and public spending, they now need to offer the best answer to myriad social questions, of which Britain’s position in the world - and relationship with the European Union - was but the first.
But, with the five years’ hindsight, is this really the case? Have economic issues become less important in explaining voting intention?
Drivers of vote choice in the UK
Figure 1: Likelihood of voting for a party based on a hypothetical manifesto
Stack conducted an A / B test, polling 1,500 UK adults on their propensity to vote for a party when given two hypothetical manifestos. Both manifestos featured the same set of economic policies, but one pledged a set of socially liberal policies (namely, an accelerated transition to green energy and a self-identification system for people looking to change their legal gender without a medical diagnosis) and the other pledged a set of socially conservative policies (their opposite: legal protections for motorists and domestic oil, gas, coal companies and tougher thresholds and increased regulation for people who want to change their legal gender).
When shown to an audience that is representative of the 2019 electorate, the socially conservative manifesto wins. Figure 1 charts the distribution of responses across the two manifestos, from a respondent being ‘Very unlikely’ to vote for the party to ‘Very likely’. Overall, the socially conservative manifesto is a marginally ‘safer bet’, garnering more positive and fewer extreme responses. More precisely, 25% of respondents say they are unlikely to vote for this party compared to 29% saying the same when presented with a socially liberal manifesto. 80% of all respondents also sit in the middle three levels of response, ranging from ‘Somewhat unlikely’ to ‘Somewhat likely’; the socially liberal manifesto meanwhile elicits stronger responses both ways as only 74% of respondents do the same when faced with this manifesto.
This does not represent a seismic divide in public opinion. There has been no ‘silent revolution’ in attitudes. Even if many Britons lean towards the socially conservative option, ‘culture war’ debates such as transgender rights and ULEZ seem not to energise them politically, as Figure 1 demonstrates.
Figure 2: Conjoint analysis results (1,500-person poll, effective sample size of 9000)
To test the importance of social issues for determining voting behaviour a different way, Stack conducted a conjoint experiment using a 1,500-person poll. Respondents were asked to select their preferred party at a hypothetical election based on a series of policy pledges. The policy areas themselves concerned three salient social issues (Brexit, transgender rights, and climate change) and three salient economic issues (business taxation, responses to public sector industrial action, and energy policy). The pledges within each policy area ranged from a socially liberal to a socially conservative stance. These pledges were randomised and put to respondents several times, so we had a large enough sample size to make claims about the effect of each individual policy position on a respondent’s likelihood to vote for it.
Figure 2 suggests that only two issues - public sector strikes and the question of nationalising the energy system - have a statistically significant effect on voting intention. Respondents are about five percent more likely to vote for a party espousing dramatic action on either issue, in either direction.
Neither business taxation nor any of the three “social” issues tested generate a statistically significant effect amongst the public. In the chart below, the confidence intervals associated with these effects (the tails either side of the dot) cross the zero line: we can’t confidently conclude that the effect of these positions is either positive or negative. Previous Stack polling has found business taxation to be perceived by the public as a relatively dry and impenetrable policy area. That this economic issue, alongside our three social issues, sees no significant effect adds more weight to the view that the public at large are not divided into two warring camps on matters non-economic. Economic issues continue to drive Britons’ voting behaviour.
Demographic divisions
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Digging deeper, Figure 3 breaks down the differences in respondent reactions to the socially liberal and conservative manifestos from Figure 1 by demographics. A larger number, whether positive or negative, indicates that changes in a party’s alleged stances on social issues motivates a greater change in this demographic’s willingness to vote for them. Where the number is positive, this indicates that this demographic favours a socially liberal manifesto; where it is negative, this demographic would rather vote for a socially conservative one.
Two clear results emerge: the first is that most demographics within the British public lean towards social conservatism. (This is unsurprising given the national-level lean we see towards social conservatism in Figure 1.) The second result is that distinct divisions and preferences in the public do exist with regards to social issues.
Figure 3: Demographics differences in preferences for a socially liberal party manifesto
There seem to be portions of British voters who do mobilise in response to social issues, even if the majority does not. Digging deeper still, Stack ran ordinal logistic regressions on responses to the party manifestos analysed above to find that age and political attention levels are important pieces of the puzzle: being aged 50 or over and expressing lower than average levels of political attention is associated with a decrease in willingness to vote for a socially liberal party equivalent to almost one unit on our five-unit scale from ‘Very likely’ to ‘Very unlikely’.
In other words, older and relatively disengaged Britons report particularly strong conservative stances on social issues such as Brexit, climate change, and transgender rights than the rest of the country. This section of the public celebrates British sovereignty outside of the European Union, resents stringent green legislation and regulation, and opposes lower legal thresholds to changing a person's legal gender. Given the strength of their views, this group holds important potential to be mobilised at the ballot box along socially conservative lines, even as these social issues remain of low salience to the rest of Britain.
The role of political parties
An outstanding question remains here as to why Labour has not sought a return to power by carving out its own socially liberal coalition of voters: young people, urban residents, and the ‘middle middle class’ (or why the party did not respond by adopting a strident pro-Leave stance before the Conservatives in the last Parliament in order to win over left-wing elements of the older disengaged).
The answer lies in the make up of the Labour and Conservative voter coalitions. Re-running our conjoint analysis with only likely Labour voters and Conservative voters (encompassing those who voted for the party in 2019 or say they will consider voting for the party at the next general election) is illustrative. In both groups, would-be voters express clear intent with respect to economic issues. Conservative partisans return a large, statistically significant 7% increase, on average, in their willingness to vote for a hypothetical party that pledges to cut business taxes and give energy companies tax breaks (although, in the current climate of the energy crisis, nationalising energy is also associated with a statistically significant 5% increase in voting likelihood). For Labour partisans, a pledge to nationalise energy is associated with a statistically significant increase in voting propensity of 5%, and a pledge to meet strikers’ demands with a significant increase of 8%.
Figure 5: Conjoint analysis results for likely Conservative voters
Figure 6: Conjoint analysis results for likely Labour voters
However, for Conservative partisans, social issues also impact their propensity to vote for a party. A party that pledges to strip all remaining EU legislation in UK law and align with strategic international partners outside the EU is associated with a highly statistically significant increase of 7% in voting propensity. And although pledging additional barriers to changing a person’s legal sex does not necessarily win votes from Conservative partisans, pledging to make it easier to change one’s legal sex certainly does lose them; this is associated with a statistically significant 5% fall in voting likelihood. Conservely, amongst Labour partisans, social issues broadly do not return significant changes in voting behaviour, with the very marginal exception of increasing restrictions on changing one’s legal sex, which is associated with a slight fall in propensity to vote for this hypothetical party.
Consequently, whilst voting Conservative is associated with a clearer and stronger expression of social conservatism, the reverse with social liberalism is much less the case for Labour voters.
In short, most British voters continue to vote principally on economic questions. But an emerging group of older, disengaged Britons who increasingly care about social issues beyond economics may tip the balance of two-party politics, and bring to the fore third parties who campaign on issues beyond straightforward economics, as the Scottish National Party already does on the issue of independence for Scotland. Looking forward, the overall impact of this group and the salience of social issues for British politics will ultimately be determined by how political parties continue to understand, engage with, and mobilise the older disengaged.