The Strategic Use of Law and Order Policy by New Labour

Expressive voting and two-dimensional political competition: an

application to law and order policy by New Labour in the UK

Stephen Drinkwater

& Colin Jennings

Business School, University of Roehampton, Roehampton Lane, London, SW15 5SL;

Wales Institute of Social and Economic, Research, Data and Methods (WISERD).

Email: [email protected]

Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS.

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

There has been much debate regarding the electoral strategy adopted by New Labour in the

lead-up to and then during their time in government. This paper addresses the issue from the

perspective of left/right and liberal/authoritarian considerations by examining data on

individual attitudes from the British Social Attitudes survey between 1986 and 2009. The

analysis indicates that New Labour’s move towards the right on economic and public policy

was the main driver towards attracting new centrist voters and could thus be labelled

‘broadly’ populist. The move towards a tougher stance on law and order was more ‘narrowly’

populist in that it was used more to minimise the reduction in support from Labour’s

traditional base on the left than to attract new votes. The evidence presented provides support

for an expressive theory of voting in that law and order policy was arguably used to counter

alienation amongst traditional, left-wing Labour supporters.

Key Words: New Labour, electoral strategy, expressive voting, issue dimensions; law and

order.

Acknowledgements : We acknowledge the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers.

The British Social Attitudes survey has been provided through the UK Data Service. Errors

are the responsibility of the authors.

1. Introduction

A distinctive feature of the New Labour governments that held power in the UK between

1997 and 2010 was the focus on a tougher approach to law and order. They signalled their

intent five years before coming to power with the famous slogan ‘tough on crime, tough on

the causes of crime’. Once in power, New Labour introduced the 1998 Crime and Disorder

Act and their taste for tougher policies could be seen across a range of policy measures;

tougher sentencing, the introduction of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), increased

surveillance and, notably after 9/11, anti-terror legislation. In this paper, we do not aim to

discuss the merits of this approach in terms of its efficacy or any normative judgement

regarding the trade-off between freedom and security. Rather, we wish to explore the extent

to which this approach was part of Labour’s electoral strategy.

A common accusation was that Labour’s approach to law and order was nakedly populist.

Law and order could be viewed as being bundled with the party’s shift from the left in terms

of economic and public policy as a general package of policies aimed at appealing to the

middle ground of British public opinion.

However, Labour’s approach to law and order is

Labour and New Labour should be treated as synonymous labels for the party and we will only use

the latter term if we wish to emphasise policy changes that were particularly associated with Tony

Blair’s leadership of the party from 1994 on.

See for example, Grayling (2009) and Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Liberty in Britain is facing death by a

thousand cuts. We can fight back’, The Guardian, 19 February, 2009. For an analysis of the origins of

penal populism, see Garland (2000).

In terms of moving economic policy to the centre, before coming to power Tony Blair successfully

fought to revise Clause IV in the Labour party constitution which called for state ownership of the

means of production, distribution and exchange. On coming to power in 1998, the Bank of England

was made independent and income tax was not increased. In subsequent years much greater sympathy

more complex than for economic and public policy. It is not immediately clear that the

approach taken by Labour was actually in the centre ground. For example, while very few

Conservatives would find themselves arguing that the Labour approach to economics and

public policy was too right-wing, a strand of Conservatives (most notably David Davis and

Kenneth Clarke) argued that the Labour approach to law and order was too authoritarian.

The criminologist Ian Loader in a Guardian article in 2008 also questioned the view that

tough attitudes to law and order dominated the centre ground, ‘there is also evidence that the

majority of people have little experience of crime, rarely think about it and, when prompted

to do so, express ambivalent feelings about the proper response to it’.

In response it could be argued that there is a difference between the actuality of a policy and

its perception. For Labour to be perceived in the centre ground of law and order they may

actually have to be tougher than the Conservatives to draw attention to how they have

changed. This seems somewhat borne out by the fact that, according to MORI (Market and

Opinion Research International) polls, as late as the 2005 election the Conservatives had an

issue advantage over Labour on crime even though Labour were dominant in most other

areas.

Even if a tough approach to law and order may possess more general appeal than a soft

approach, there may be an alternative more powerful explanation for Labour’s approach

was given to the use of market forces in the provision of key public services such as education and

health.

David Davis, the then shadow home secretary, resigned his seat in 2008 and fought for re-election

to draw attention to what he perceived as the erosion in civil liberties in Britain. On the election of the

Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition in May 2010 Kenneth Clarke became Secretary of State for

Justice and argued for a reduction in prison numbers.

‘Straw’s embrace of penal excess ignores public will’, The Guardian, 28 October, 2008.

which focuses more narrowly on popularity within their traditional base rather than appealing

to the public at large, who were clearly the target when moving to the centre ground on the

dominant issue of economic and public policy. This will rest on the claim that law and order

could be used as a tool to retain core support in the event that they lose the battle on the

centre-ground of politics which is concerned primarily with economics and public policy.

The idea here is that traditional Labour support is left-wing but that this support may hold

highly differing views along an authoritarian/liberal axis. As Labour necessarily moved to the

centre ground on the left-right dimension in order to be electorally competitive they risked

alienating their traditional supporters. From a purely electoral perspective, this would not

matter if the sacrifice of the base led to victory in the elections due to the greater weight of

newly acquired floating voters motivated primarily by Labour’s shift to the centre on left-

right issues. The long-term risk is that as political battle loses its ideological edge, Labour

would lose centrist voters to the Conservatives and also lose their traditional support by

moving too far from their left-wing preferences.

Therefore, an electoral strategy for Labour was to move to the centre-ground on the key left-

right dimension, but ask whether there was something they could do on the authoritarian-

liberal dimension that would keep them close enough to their traditional base so that it keeps

voting for them. The proof of narrow populism in this case would be that more votes are

retained in taking a tough rather than a more liberal stance on law and order. That is, there

would be more votes to be retained by appealing to authoritarian left-wingers than liberal left-

wingers. Indeed, it is claimed that law and order only became an electoral issue because

Labour under Tony Blair made it into one.

We would like to consider the idea that the tough

approach was not developed so much to appeal to the general public, but to what they

considered a key constituency within their traditional core support who in other respects may

have felt abandoned by the other policies pursued by the Labour party. Our hypothesis is that

if the approach of Labour was purely electorally motivated it was two-pronged; the primary

strategy was to move to the right to attract floating voters and a secondary strategy was to

move towards authoritarianism to hang on to a specific constituency of their traditional left-

wing base.

We analyse data from the British Social Attitudes survey to test our hypothesis that if the New

Labour approach to law and order was populist, it was populist in a different sense to their

economic and public policies in that it was not a policy primarily aimed at winning new

voters in the centre ground of politics, but rather retaining as many votes as possible on the

left. We label the former ‘broad’ populism and the latter ‘narrow’ populism.

The empirical findings bear out this argument, however, we are aware that we cannot rule out

the possibility that the policy on law and order was conducted for reasons unrelated to

popularity. First, an alternative explanation is that they succumbed to the eternal temptation

to strengthen the power of government regardless of the electoral consequences. A second

explanation is that they were statesmanlike and took a tougher stance on law and order

‘Anti-Social Behaviour: It’s Back’, The Economist, October 1

, 2009. Downes and Morgan (2002

and 2007) provide a historical context for this claim. They point out that law and order only started to

appear in party manifestos in the 1960s and it was only with Thatcher that the Conservatives used it as

a political stick with which to beat Labour. Labour did not contest an area which they correctly

viewed as a weakness until the 1990s when Blair tried to wrestle law and order policy from the

Conservatives.

because they thought it was the right thing to do regardless of its electoral consequences.

This would fit with the common retort to the left-liberal constituency that it easy to hold

liberal views on law and order (and to dismiss those who hold tough views as ill informed)

because they come in the main from a largely privileged background and are thus unaffected

by crime. This point is made repeatedly by Tony Blair in his autobiography (Blair, 2010).

Populism and good policy are not by definition in conflict, although much of the commentary

on the Labour approach suggests that the alleged populism was, in fact, in serious conflict

with good policy on law and order. After discussing related literature, we discuss the

theoretical background. These two sections will lay out the idea that our theory concerning

Labour’s approach to law and order is also an expressive account of political support (or non-

support). We then introduce the data to be analysed and consider some empirical evidence

before making some concluding comments.

2. Related Literature

There are a small number of surveys of New Labour’s approach to law and order. Downes

and Morgan (2002 and 2007) discuss Labour’s law and order policy within a broad historical

context. Chalmers and Leverik (2013) analyse the enormous expansion of new criminal

offences over the period of Labour government from 1997 to 2010. Saward (2006) provides a

discussion of civil liberties in the post 9/11 world and covers in detail anti-terror legislation

and ASBOs. Beloff (2007) discusses the relationship between Tony Blair and the law and

judiciary and provides another example of the accusation of populism when he writes, ‘he

displayed no particular appetite for engaging with legal issues, apart from using populist

philosophy’ (p.292). In the same book, Newburn and Reiner (2007) discuss crime and penal

This does not mean though that the policy would necessarily be the correct one. See, for example,

Millie (2007) who argues that anti-social behaviour has been both misidentified and over identified.

policy and with reference to the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act argue that ‘Blatcherism was

Butskellism in reverse’ (p. 324). They catalogue the sheer quantity and speed of legislation

and increases in incarceration and conclude that

Majoritarian electoral systems do require centre-left parties to capture a substantial

section of the middle-class vote. Arguably they must allay middle-earners’ fears about

redistribution at their expense by tough leadership espousing middle-class values

against the left of the party. Sun-worshipping law and order policies and tight central

control follow from this logic. (p. 339-340).

This quotation is at odds with the one by Ian Loader used earlier which suggests that the

majority view on the issue is not so clear, so it would be unclear why a tough stance on law

and order would compensate for fears about a future lurch to the left by Labour on economic

and public policy. Also, and an even stronger point, given the effort by New Labour in the

years before coming to power and the policies they initiated on taking power, relates to how

realistic is the idea that the middle-class would have feared a lurch to the left. Our thesis is

that the tougher stance is taken to allay the sense of alienation felt by those with left-

authoritarian preferences due to Labour’s shift towards the middle ground on economic and

public policy.

The idea of a voter feeling alienated and not voting, or ‘wasting’ a vote on a minor party is

commonplace, but the logic does not follow easily from standard models of voting. Probably

the most famous model of voting stems from Downs’ (1957) depiction of political

competition. Voters are considered as having heterogeneous preferences along issue

dimensions, they vote instrumentally (as an indirect means to achieve favourable outcomes)

and parties compete to win power by choosing a political position in the issue space. When

there is only one dimension, usually thought of as left-right, the prediction is that if there are

two parties and they are purely concerned with winning they will converge at the preference

of the median voter. Even if we relax this extreme prediction, convergence towards the

middle ground is likely. But in this model, as Brennan and Hamlin (1998) point out, the

citizens with greatest incentive to vote are those on the extremes because the stakes for them

are higher than for those with preferences close to where the parties have set their policies. In

the Downs environment, alienation should not play a role. If some do not vote it must be

because their preferences lie somewhere between the largely converged positions of the

parties and they are indifferent to the outcome.

An alternative instrumental theory of voting originates with Stokes (1963) and removes the

idea of heterogeneity of preferences over policy in the issue space. Instead, this theory

considers voting to be determined by valence issues. Voters agree on the policy, such as a

well-managed economy, and they will vote for whichever party they believe will do best at

delivering that. There is a literature that argues that UK elections have shifted from being

Downsian to being valence dominated (Sanders and Brynin, 1999; Whiteley et al., 2005;

Green, 2007; Green and Hobolt, 2008).

To a large extent, the Downsian and valence models are not competing models of voting, but

rather that if the Downsian prediction of policy convergence is borne out we would expect

valence to play a large role in determining votes because there is less disagreement on the

content of policy between the main parties. The public will then vote for which party they

believe will be best in delivering the agreed policy. Again, there would appear to be no role

for alienation. If valence issues are dominant then political competition is dominated by

issues on which voters agree, so citizens who are more extreme should have no less incentive

to vote than for more centrist citizens.

The third model of voting (expressive voting) makes sense of the idea of alienated voters.

There is no single agreed theory of expressive voting, but the logic of expressive voting is

well understood, see Hamlin and Jennings (2011) for a definition and a survey of the

literature. As the number of voters becomes large, the probability of an individual being

decisive in determining the outcome of elections becomes very small. As a result, the indirect

instrumental benefit of choosing one party over another becomes very small. This means that

if there is a direct expressive benefit associated with voting, then this benefit must weigh

more heavily in voting calculus than other domains of decision-making where the individual

is more likely to be decisive, for example in market choice.

Brennan and Hamlin (1998) use this insight to provide an explanation for alienation. They

agree largely with a purely instrumental Downsian model of voting that there will be a

centripetal force pulling political positions towards the centre. However, this will lead them

to occupy political positions that lie some distance from citizens towards the extremes. These

citizens will receive lower expressive benefits from voting for centrist parties and given the

very small instrumental benefit of voting may decide not to vote at all, or vote for a party

located close to them although it may have no realistic chance of gaining power.

If this

Johnston and Pattie (2011) provide an empirical analysis of the decline of New Labour that

incorporates both spatial and valence perspectives.

The paper received some empirical attention. Greene and Nelson (2002) did not find empirical

support, but later studies such as Drinkwater and Jennings (2007) and Calcagno and Westley (2008)

find that there is evidence to support the Brennan and Hamlin hypothesis. Note that in the Brennan

and Hamlin model, instrumental and expressive preferences are aligned but the latter needs to be

relatively strong to induce voting at all. See Taylor (2015) for a model that recognises that even when

model of expressive voting is accepted, it would follow that as Labour moved to the right

they risked alienating traditional left-wing voters. The choice of policy on the liberal-

authoritarian axis could then be selected to retain the greatest amount of this potentially

alienated support and it could be for this, more narrowly populist, reason that they choose to

become more authoritarian.

Interestingly, Brennan (2008) has written on crime and punishment from an expressive

perspective. He argues that the very high levels of incarceration that has been witnessed in

the US and Australia bear witness to an expressive explanation for electoral behaviour.

Calculations of whether the cost of incarceration is justified by the benefits it provides are not

important for voters because they are so unlikely to determine the outcome of elections. As a

result, they choose a policy that expressively appeals to them. Brennan argues that increased

incarceration is expressively appealing for many voters.

In a detailed study of the British National Party, Ford and Goodwin (2010) argue that the

BNP mainly attracted ex-Labour voters. Our theory is not that a tough stance on law and

order increases support for Labour, but rather that it would stem the loss of support from a

constituency such as this, as they are likely to support a tough stance on law and order. Later

we will argue that the strategy worked reasonably well until 2001. Evans and Chzhen (2013)

find that immigration became an increasingly salient issue and that this plays a key role in

defection from Labour from 2005-10. Given that those that hold strongly anti-immigrant

views are more likely to support a tough stance on law and order (Chirumbolo et al., 2004),

voting is strategic and thus seemingly instrumental, expressiveness cannot be ruled out as the crucial

underlying motivation.

the salience of this issue may well have begun to undermine law and order policy by the mid-

2000s.

Throughout this paper, we take the position that the most critical issue determining the voting

decision is economic policy and its execution broadly defined. However, an eyebrow might

be raised when one considers how an issue such as crime seems to consistently rank so highly

in polls as to ‘the most important issue’. Johns (2010) demonstrates that we should not leap to

conclude from these polls that issues considered most important are the issues that actually

determine voting. Johns found that ‘there was little evidence of issue voting among those

naming asylum and crime’ (p. 156). Therefore, if the approach of Labour was purely

electorally motivated we argue that it was two-pronged; the primary strategy was to move to

the right to attract floating voters and a secondary strategy was to move towards

authoritarianism to hang on to a specific constituency of their traditional left-wing base.

3. Theoretical Background

We depict a 2-dimensional setting with the horizontal axis being left-right and the vertical

axis liberal-authoritarian with increasing authoritarianism as we move up the vertical axis as

shown in Figure 1.

One of the main groups that voted for the UK to leave the European Union in the June 2016

referendum was traditional working-class communities. One might argue that as immigration

surpassed law and order in salience by the mid-2000s, tough law and order policy could be viewed as

the last issue on which the modern Labour party connected with their traditional base. When the party

leadership in 2016 recommended voting for remain in the referendum, this constituency no longer

listened and voted leave instead.

Figure 1

Preferences given that Left-Right is the Dominant Policy Dimension

An individual x has preferences in two dimensions given by

 

,xx

where

depicts left-

right and

depicts liberal-authoritarian preferences. Their voting choice will be determined,

first, by which party is closest to them and second (capturing the possibility of expressive

alienation) that the closest party is still within a distance c of

 

,xx

. If both parties are

further than c, x will prefer to abstain or vote for a minor party. The distance from x’s

preference to a policy profile

 

,yy

could be depicted as the simple Euclidean distance

   

1 1 2 2

y x y x  

. This would mean that the indifference curves are circles. However,

we are assuming that left-right is the dominant policy dimension. As such we should consider

weighted Euclidean distance given by

   

1 1 2 2

y x A y x  

where

01A

. This means

that the indifference curves are ellipses, which given that the left/right dimension is on the

Left-right

Liberal-authoritarian

horizontal axis the ellipses are crunched in from the sides, as shown in Figure 1. This figure

indicates that a small movement away from a citizen’s ideal position on the left-right axis

would require a larger movement on liberal-authoritarian axis to compensate.

So in order to win a vote, two conditions need to be met. First, the distance must be less than

the rival party. Second, the distance must be within distance c. These are given by

       

2 2 2 2

1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2

y x A y x z x A z x      

(1)

   

1 1 2 2

y x A y x c   

(2)

In a model where there is no expressive voting and all voters vote in two dimensions where

political competition is dominated by two strategic parties there would not be an equilibrium,

but we would expect parties to offer roughly similar policies somewhere in the region of the

median of the two axes. If the dominant policy dimension is very dominant, reflected in a low

value of A, then we might expect the location of policy on the liberal-authoritarian axis to be

largely irrelevant so politics would be dominated by the left-right axis. The reason is that left-

wing voters will keep voting for the more left-wing party even if it is not very left-wing at all.

This fits with the Brennan and Hamlin analysis – in a purely instrumental model those with

the strongest preferences on left and right have the most incentive to vote even if the left and

right parties are moderate. In an expressive model, this changes because these voters will

drop out/vote elsewhere due to alienation. In a purely instrumental approach, the conclusion

may be that policy on a minor dimension is only marginally significant. In an expressive

approach, policy on the minor dimension could become much more important because it may

be a means by which voters can be retained.

In terms of conditions (1) and (2), in a purely instrumental model dominated by two main

parties condition (2) is irrelevant. So long as Labour is to the left of the Conservatives (which

can easily be understood as rooted in the need to satisfy, to at least some extent, the

traditional core support within the two parties) left-wing voters will vote Labour. In an

expressive model, the distance from the party position should not be too great in terms of (2)

to justify voting Labour. So although the left-wing voter would prefer Labour to the

Conservatives they will either not vote or vote for a minor party. It is within the structure of

this model that it may make sense to manipulate policy (by setting y

very close to x

) on law

and order to ensure that policy distance is kept below c. If the charge of narrow populism is

correct, then we should find evidence that shows this approach retained a larger proportion of

left-wing support than was lost in the further alienation of left-wing voters who were also

liberal.

New Labour’s tough approach to law and order providing evidence for expressive voting thus

rests on the distance Labour had moved to the economic right from its traditional base on the

economic left. An instrumental account of voting would predict continued left-wing voting

for Labour as they more closely represent left-wing interests than the Conservatives (although

the distance between Labour and the Conservatives has closed). Under this theory, so long as

Labour is to the left of the Conservatives then that is all Labour needs to do to retain all of

their left-wing support. An expressive theory would predict instead, that votes will leak from

the left for Labour as these citizens feel alienated by New Labour’s economic policy.

However, given that expressive voting is based on a feeling of identity with a party, Labour

realised that law and order policy could be used to maintain sufficient identity for some of

these voters who would otherwise be lost to non-voting or voting for minor parties. As we

shall see there are more authoritarian left-wingers than liberal left-wingers and for this reason

we argue that policy was set so as to expressively appeal to the former and minimise the loss

of support on the left for Labour.

4. Data

The data source used in this paper is the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. This is a

representative survey of adults aged 18 and over living in private households in Great Britain,

which contains information on a wide range of attitudes.

Areas north of the Caledonian

Canal are excluded because of their dispersed population, whilst a separate survey is carried

out in Northern Ireland. The survey has been carried out annually since 1983, apart from in

1988 and 1992, with some variations in the sample size over time. We analyse information

from surveys that have taken place since 1986 since these contain information on the left-

right and liberal-authoritarian variables, as well as on party identification.

In order to classify different political views, we construct a categorical variable that

combines information from the five left-right variables and six liberal-authoritarian variables

that have been included in the BSA survey. These have been asked in each survey since

1986.

The items used to construct the left-right variable are the following:

 Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off.

 Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers.

 Ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth.

Detailed information on the survey and sample design can be found in Exley et al. (2002).

Despite the components of each variable being available in earlier years, the BSA files made

available through the UK Data Service only contain the composite variables from 1994 onwards.

Therefore, for the years between 1986 and 1993, the left-right and libertarian-authoritarian variables

have been constructed by the authors using the individual components. Missing values to individual

items have been excluded from the construction of the two measures.

 There is one law for the rich and one for the poor.

 Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance.

Respondents are asked to choose how strongly they agreed or disagreed with each of the

statements using a 5-point Likert scale. The left-right variable was then created by grouping

(by taking an average of) the responses to the items. Therefore, if a person strongly agreed

with each of the above statements then they were assigned a value of 1 (left) and if they

strongly disagreed with each of the statements they were assigned a value of 5 (right) on the

left-right scale. Further details on the construction of this measure can be found in Heath et

al. (1994) and Evans et al. (1996). Similarly, the items used to construct the libertarian-

authoritarian scale (which we relabel as liberal-authoritarian) are the following:

 Young people today don’t have enough respect for traditional British values.

 For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence.

 Schools should teach children to obey authority.

 The law should always be obeyed even if a particular law is wrong.

 Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards.

 People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences.

Therefore a value of 1 on this scale would indicate an extreme liberal and a value of 5 an

extreme authoritarian. Again see Heath et al. (1994) and Evans et al. (1996) for a detailed

discussion of this measure.

The political attitudes categories that we use in the empirical analysis have been created by

combining information from both the left-right and liberal-authoritarian variables. In

particular, the categories are a combination of three groups of left-right indicators (left, centre

and right) and three groups of liberal-authoritarian indicators (liberal, moderate and

authoritarian). These two sets of groups have been defined in the following way:

Left:

21 

Centre:

32 

Right:

53 

where LR

is the value on the left-right scale for respondent i.

Liberal:

5.31 

Moderate:

45.3 

Authoritarian:

54 

where LA

is the value on the liberal-authoritarian variable for respondent i.

The upper and lower boundaries for each group were selected to ensure an adequate

distribution across the three groups over time, especially since neither the left-right or the

liberal-authoritarian variable is truly continuous since they have been constructed using either

five or six integers and as a result there is some clustering around particular values.

A single

variable containing nine categories was then created using both sets of groups to summarise a

person’s political outlook. These categories are shown in the first column of Table 1.

The analysis that follows uses information from annual BSA surveys that have been pooled

together from 1986 until 2009, with five time periods identified during this interval. These

are 1986-91, 1993-7, 1998-2001, 2002-5 and 2006-9. These have been chosen to achieve

reasonable sample sizes in each period but also to roughly accord with recent periods in

Labour party history: opposition, lead-up to government, first, second and third

administrations. The number of observations in these time periods varies according to the

total number of respondents and on whether the attitudinal questions were asked to all of the

individuals that were interviewed or just a proportion of them who were interviewed in each

year. In total, the full sample includes over 57,000 observations, with the highest number

appearing in the final time period and the lowest number in the first.

Table 1 presents the distribution of political attitudes across the nine categories over the five

time periods. It shows that there has been a rightwards shift in political attitudes since the

late-1980s. As a result, attitudes have become more concentrated in the middle, with the

percentage accounted for by the centre-authoritarian category increasing from 12.2% in 1986-

91 to 16.3% in 1998-2001, and remaining around this percentage in the final period. A

slightly smaller percentage-point increase was observed in the centre-moderate category over

the five periods. In contrast, the percentage in the left-liberal category more than halved in

size and falls of 2-4 percentage points were also observed in the left-moderate and left-

authoritarian categories. There were only relatively small fluctuations in the percentage

accounted for by the three right categories. The largest changes were observed for the right-

authoritarian category, which fell by almost 3 percentage points over the first two periods

before increasing slightly over the final three periods.

5. Analysis of Changing Political Attitudes

In this section, the distribution of political categories presented in Table 1 are examined with

respect to the political party that the individual identifies themselves with. Party identification

occurs at three different levels: individuals reporting that they support a certain party; those

stating that they are sympathetic to a party and finally people who say that they are closest to

a party. In our analysis, the three groups identifying themselves with a particular party are

analysed collectively.

Table 2 reports the percentage of Labour party identifiers within each political category over

the five periods. This table also indicates whether the percentage of Labour identifiers in each

category during periods 2-5 is significantly different to the first period. The table shows that

support amongst what might be considered to be traditional core Labour voters (i.e. those

with left-leaning attitudes) declined after the mid-1990s. In particular, the percentage of

Labour party identifiers in the left-liberal category fell from just over 70% in 1986-91 and

1993-7 to under 48% in 2006-9. The largest falls occurred between periods 2 and 3 and

periods 4 and 5. The percentage of Labour identifiers in the left-moderate and the left-

authoritarian categories also declined by around 21 and 17 percentage points respectively

between the second and fifth periods, with the highest falls observed between periods 3 and 4

and periods 4 and 5, as also indicated by the tests of significance. The loss of support was

least for the most populated (authoritarian) category on the left. This is in line with our

hypothesis. However, the loss of support across the whole sample period misses the more

nuanced aspect to the theory. By 2001, Labour had established itself as a centre party, tough

on law and order and this is reflected by the big fall in left-liberal support from period 1 to 3

of 9 percentage points relative to the fall of 3 percentage points for left-authoritarian support

and, indeed, the increase in support of about 1 percentage point for left-moderates. We would

argue that the big falls in support after 2001 were related to the general fall in support for

Labour which could be seen across all nine categories and, as mentioned earlier, the

increasing salience of immigration as identified by Evans and Chzhen (2013). The period up

to 2001 captures the two trade-offs we wish to investigate. First, there is the loss of left

support in order to make gains in the centre and on the right. Second, minimising the loss

from the most populated left (authoritarian) category by leaking more support in the least

populated left (liberal) category.

The percentage of Labour party identifiers in each of the three centre categories peaks in the

middle period (1998-2001). The largest increase up to this point was seen in the centre-

authoritarian category, since 42% of this category were Labour party identifiers in 1998-

2001, compared to 27% in 1986-91. This 15 percentage point change compares to increases

of 6 and 11 percentage points in the other two centre categories. The majority of the increase

in Labour identifiers within the three centre categories occurred between the first and second

period. Fairly similar percentage point declines were seen for all three centre categories

between the third and fifth periods, with falls of around 14, 11 and 11 percentage points being

observed. This would appear to provide confirmation of the importance of moving

economic/public policy to the centre ground in the early years of new Labour.

The incidence of Labour party identifiers within the three right categories showed a similar

pattern. This is particularly the case for the increase in Labour identifiers up to the third

period, with the decline after this being less pronounced than that observed for the three

centre categories. For example, the percentage of Labour party identifiers in the right-

authoritarian category increased from 3% in 1986-91 to 20% in 1998-2001 and still remained

at an appreciable 17% in 2006-9.

The importance of the centre-moderate and centre-authoritarian categories is further

demonstrated in Table 3. It indicates that these two categories accounted for 34% of all

Labour identifiers in the first period before rising to around 40% in the second period and

43% of all Labour identifiers in the third period. It further increased to 44.6% and 46.5% in

the final two periods. In contrast, the percentage of Labour identifiers accounted for by the

three left categories fell across the five periods, from 12% to 4% for left-liberals and from

15% to 9% for left-authoritarians. The key point here is that support in the left-authoritarian

category was more numerous than the left-liberal category. While the proportion of overall

Labour support declined across the five periods in all three categories on the left, the

proportion of support coming from the left-authoritarian category remained very important.

There was a fairly steady rise from the initial small proportion of Labour identifiers in the

three right categories. By the final period the three right categories accounted for almost 16%

of all Labour identifiers, up from under 5% in the first period, with a relatively large increase

observed in the right-moderate category, especially between the second and third periods.

We now further explore how political allegiance changed for what might be thought to be the

traditional Labour support base by using data from the BSA survey to establish where non-

Labour identifiers from each of the three leftist political categories were distributed across the

five periods. In particular, Table 4 reports how the distribution of individuals in the three left

political categories varies for non-Labour identifiers across the five periods. The table shows

that the percentage of individuals with leftist political views generally increased for all four

other parties/groups. The only real exception to this was the significant decline observed in

the percentage of Liberal Democrat identifiers amongst the left-authoritarian category. The

largest increases occurred amongst individuals with leftist political views identifying with

other parties and those not identifying with any party at all. The increase in support for other

parties is most noticeable amongst the left-liberal category, which grew by over 10

percentage points between the first and final periods. Further analysis of this change reveals

that the main party to experience a rise in support was the Green party. In particular, the

percentage of Green party identifiers amongst this category increased from 2.5% in the first

period to 9.1% in the final period. There was also a significant rise in the percentage of left-

liberals identifying themselves as Liberal Democrat in the later periods.

A rise in support for some minority right-wing parties was more evident amongst people in

the left-authoritarian category, with UKIP/BNP identifiers increasing to 4.9% in period 5,

compared to 1.3% for the Green party. However, the most important change for individuals

in this category occurred for those not identifying with any political party, since the

percentage increased from just over 8% to almost 20% of the total sample in this category

across the five periods. A fairly similar percentage point increase can also be observed in the

left-moderate category, whereas the change in the percentage of no-party identifiers in the

left-liberal category was far smaller.

A key point is that up to 2001, leftists with authoritarian preferences increase primarily in the

non-identifying category, while they actually drop for the Conservatives and Liberal

Democrats and increase only slightly for other parties. In the same periods, left-liberal

support increases for the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and other parties, although these

differences tend not to be significant. This is in line with our hypothesis that Labour’s law

and order policy protected support among left- authoritarians (at least against capture by

other parties), at the expense of losing support (to other parties) amongst left-liberals. After

2001, however, there were some significant increases in left-authoritarians supporting other

parties, as well as non-identifying.

This suggests the use of law and order to hold on to the

flank was beginning to crack after 2001, but was fairly successful up to that point.

The analysis presented would appear to provide evidence in support of the primacy of

economic and public policy over law and order. In particular, the BSA data in Table 2

indicates that Labour support amongst centre and right liberals increased up to 1998-2001 at a

There was also a significantly higher percentage of Conservative identifiers in this category in the

final period.

time when it was declining for left-liberals. This would seem to indicate that the move to the

centre in economic and public policy was of greater consequence than a more authoritarian

approach towards law and order. The evidence indicates strong support for our hypothesis

regarding two types of populism. It suggests that economic and public policy was the main

electoral issue and the move to the right was used by Labour to attract new votes and was

thus broadly populist. A more authoritarian law and order approach could not prevent a loss

of support on the left, but it stemmed the flow from the most populated left-wing category,

especially up to the end of the first administration in 2001. In terms of the theoretical

background discussed earlier, it is really only the expressive voting model that can make

sense of this. Valence voting would eliminate differences as a factor and instrumental voting

would imply that leftists should be the most motivated to continue supporting Labour, so long

as Labour was still somewhat to the left of the Conservatives. Leftist support was leaking

prior to 2001, when it was increasing for centrists and rightists, and we take this as very

suggestive evidence for alienation and the need to minimise alienation’s negative electoral

effect through the use of tough policy on law and order.

Conclusions

This paper considers some of the large changes that have occurred in the recent UK political

landscape by examining how the support base for the Labour party has evolved along both

left-right and liberal-authoritarian dimensions since the mid-1980s. This has mainly been

achieved through analysing consecutive annual data from the BSA survey. The analysis

reveals that there has been a shift in Labour party identifiers from the traditional base

amongst left-leaning voters towards a more centrist political stance but there is also evidence

that voters with more authoritarian attitudes were targeted. This is consistent with the harder

stance that was taken on law and order. Our thesis is that the tough approach to law and order

was not intended as a broadly populist vote-winner. This role was played (extremely well) by

economic and public policy shifts to the centre. Rather, it was a narrowly populist policy to

retain as large a share of the reduced support on the left as possible. Economic and public

policy was used to win votes in the centre and right and law and order policy was used to

minimise the loss of votes on the left. The evidence suggests this worked quite well up to

2001 but appeared to become less effective after that.

We set aside the question as to whether the tough approach to law and order was also

‘cynical’ populism where policy is simply implemented for its popularity regardless of

whether it is good policy or not. We believe that those commentators who view the new

Labour approach to law and order as a broadly populist policy in the same mould as their

economic and public policy are missing a subtle distinction between the two approaches. We

argue that this finding can only be properly understood, theoretically, as driven by expressive

voting, as it is only expressive voting that can properly address the role of alienation in

voting. Finally, we believe the analysis conducted here is not just of recent historical

significance. The use of tough law and order policy worked reasonably well until the early

2000s as a connection with the traditional Labour base. It failed after that and this

disconnection between the party and its traditional supporters would, we argue, eventually

appear as a significant factor in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership.

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Table 1

Percentage Distribution of Attitudes by Political Category

1986-91

1993-7

1998-2001

2002-5

2006-9

1986-2009

Left-liberal

6.1

6.3

4.3

3.9

3.0

4.6

Left-moderate

7.8

7.6

4.7

4.5

4.0

5.5

Left-authoritarian

9.2

10.1

9.1

8.0

7.0

8.6

Centre-liberal

16.2

16.8

18.1

17.1

16.8

17.0

Centre-moderate

25.6

28.7

27.6

28.7

29.5

28.2

Centre-authoritarian

12.1

14.0

16.3

15.5

16.5

15.1

Right-liberal

5.8

4.1

6.1

7.3

7.4

6.2

Right-moderate

9.7

7.6

8.7

9.8

10.6

9.3

Right-authoritarian

7.6

4.8

5.1

5.2

5.3

5.5

Number of observations

8,779

11,305

10,535

12,348

13,868

56,835

Table 2

Percentage of Labour Party Identifiers by Political Category

1986-91

1993-97

1998-2001

2002-5

2006-9

1986-2009

Left-liberal

70.6

71.2

61.7***

56.1***

47.8***

63.0

Left-moderate

58.9

63.2*

60.1

48.5***

42.2***

55.6

Left-authoritarian

58.4

58.3

55.2

49.6***

41.4***

52.6

Centre-liberal

46.1

51.6***

52.1***

46.1

38.3***

46.6

Centre-moderate

34.9

43.4***

45.8***

41.7***

34.6

40.0

Centre-authoritarian

26.8

35.5***

42.3***

37.8***

31.0**

35.1

Right-liberal

14.7

24.0***

33.6***

32.5***

27.9***

27.7

Right-moderate

5.9

13.6***

27.1***

24.6***

20.5***

19.1

Right-authoritarian

3.0

9.1***

20.3***

19.4***

16.6***

13.6

Note: The stars indicate a significance difference in the percentage of Labour identifiers

within each political category relative to the 1986-91 period. * indicates significance at the

10% level (using a two tailed test), ** at the 5% level and *** at the 1% level.

Table 3

Percentage Distribution Across the Political Categories for Labour Identifiers

1986-91

1993-7

1998-2001

2002-5

2006-9

1986-2009

Left-liberal

12.3

10.5

6.1

5.5

4.4

7.5

Left-moderate

13.0

11.0

6.5

5.5

5.1

7.9

Left-authoritarian

15.0

13.6

11.3

10.1

9.0

11.6

Centre-liberal

21.0

19.9

20.9

19.8

19.2

20.1

Centre-moderate

24.9

28.2

27.9

29.9

30.9

28.6

Centre-authoritarian

9.1

11.3

15.3

14.7

15.6

13.5

Right-liberal

2.4

2.2

4.5

6.0

6.3

4.4

Right-moderate

1.6

2.3

5.3

6.0

6.7

4.5

Right-authoritarian

0.6

1.0

2.3

2.6

2.7

1.9

Number of observations

2,981

4,743

4,556

4,704

4,262

21,246

Table 4

Distribution of Non-Labour Identifiers Across the Leftist Political Categories

1986-91

1993-97

1998-2001

2002-5

2006-9

1986-2009

CONSERVATIVES

Left-liberal

5.2

4.9

5.4

4.1

6.6

5.2

Left-moderate

15.1

9.3***

10.2**

13.8

16.6

12.7

Left-authoritarian

16.8

15.4

16.0

17.2

21.3**

17.3

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

Left-liberal

11.1

9.6

13.4

17.3***

18.0***

13.3

Left-moderate

12.6

13.6

11.0

13.0

11.2

12.4

Left-authoritarian

13.4

12.6

9.2***

8.4***

10.5

OTHER

Left-liberal

6.7

7.2

10.1*

13.2***

17.0***

10.2

Left-moderate

4.6

5.2

4.9

7.0*

12.0***

6.5

Left-authoritarian

3.1

4.1

4.3

7.2***

9.4***

5.6

NONE

Left-liberal

6.3

7.2

9.4*

9.3*

10.6**

8.3

Left-moderate

8.8

8.7

13.7***

17.7***

18.1***

12.7

Left-authoritarian

8.2

9.7

15.3***

16.8***

19.6***

14.0

Note: The table reports the percentage of individuals from each of the three leftist political

categories reporting that they were Conservative identifiers, Liberal Democrat identifiers,

other party identifiers or did not identify with any party. The stars indicate a significance

difference in the percentage of such identifiers within each political category relative to the

1986-91 period. * indicates significance at the 10% level (using a two tailed test), ** at the

5% level and *** at the 1% level.