The changing meaning of left-right in UK politics

After a turbulent decade of politics, dominated by the UK’s referendum on and exit from the EU, how do British voters think about the left-right space of political competition? How do they place themselves on a left-right self-placement scale, and how does this relate to multiple dimensions of ideological values? Did the EU referendum create a new realignment or dealignment within the electorate, or did it simply reflect already existing divisions? The three papers in this thesis use an exploration of measures of ideology over ten years in British politics to explore these questions. Increasingly, as highlighted by the EU referendum, British politics has been dominated by issues on the cultural, rather than economic, dimension of political conflict. This thesis explores the way the mass public has increasingly incorporated their cultural values into their own left-right self-placement. The first paper finds that economic values have become less predictive of left-right self-placement over time as cultural values have become more predictive of left-right self-placement, particularly for those on the right. The second paper finds that the EU referendum crystallised pre-existing ideological divisions within the Labour coalition, while it seemed to create new ideological divisions within the Conservative coalition. In my third paper, an original survey experiment finds that priming respondents on the cultural dimension shifts their left-right self-placement towards their cultural values. Alternatively, it finds no effect of priming on the economic dimension. These papers demonstrate a shift in British politics in the last decade, where cultural issues have become more central to how voters define their left-right self-placement. This has disrupted the coalitions of the two major parties and provides the grounds for a realignment in British politics, where the cultural dimension will exist alongside or even replace the economic dimension.