Post

New paper from me, Olli Heath, Humphrey Southall and Paula Aucott, just out in @polstudies.bsky.social: The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024 We link ~140 years of census and election data to map the relationship between class and vote in Britain doi.org/10.1177/0032...

We show that there is clear evidence of class Lib-Con voting in the late Victorian era, but the Liberals were rapidly supplanted and surpassed by the emergence of Labour in the first decades of the 20th century.

Once established, the Lab-Con class relationship was remarkably stable from the 1920s into the 1990s, at which point the class-Lab association begins to decline, and then the class-Con association shifts more abruptly in 2017-19.

Using a Bayesian changepoint model, we try and pin down when the class-vote association changed: the stabilisation of class voting in the 1920s; a brief drop for Labour after the Second World War; and then a more significant turn for Labour in the Blair era, and the Conservative around Brexit.