Post

We use more than sixty years of British Election Study data to examine how electoral shocks - and Brexit in particular - have transformed the relationship between voters’ social characteristics, political values and party choices.

We argue that Brexit - and the parties’ reactions to it - lead to a sorting process that accelerated a longer-term realignment of British politics around age, education and social values.

This realignment persisted beyond the 2019 ‘Brexit election’ because the electoral shocks that followed (e.g. the pandemic and cost of living crisis) were primarily about competence rather than ideology - shifting the electoral ‘tides’ but not the electoral ‘tribes’.