How are Working Class Candidates Different? Evidence from UK General Elections

• In Event: Sociocultural Conflict in a Globalized Era

Abstract

Partisan re-alignment and dealignment are important recent trends in advanced democracies. In the most recent United Kingdom general election the Labour Party lost many of its longstanding working class strongholds, while performing relatively better in high educated and more affluent constituencies. How did the Labour Party lose its dominant position in these working class constituencies? Using a unique dataset covering the class background of parliamentary candidates in the United Kingdom from the 1970s until today, I show that even as descriptive representation for other types of voters has increased, the descriptive representation of voters from lower class occupational backgrounds has dramatically declined. I use district level demographic data to show that this decline cannot be explained by simple demographic change, and instead the result of strategic decisions by the political parties. I then analyze a dataset of campaign materials covering the period of 1992-2010 using structural topics models and scaling methods which show how the issues that candidate emphasized and the positions that candidates took in their constituency level campaigns evolved over this period. As working class candidates were replaced by candidates with more affluent professional backgrounds, the issue emphasis in these constituencies shifted away from traditional social democratic concerns and converged with the messaging of “New Labour”. These results show that, at the constituency level, both the descriptive and programmatic representation of voters from lower class occupational backgrounds declined, providing one explanation for the decline of the Labour Party among such voters.

Author

• Will Horne, Princeton University