Labour as the Party of Wales: Explaining 100 Years of Labour Dominance

• In Event: The State of the Union(s): Sub-National Challenges to the UK

Abstract

November 2022 will mark a century of Labour dominance in Wales; a period of time during which Labour has emerged from every UK general and Welsh devolved election with at least a plurality of both seats and votes in Wales. There are few if any parallels in the democratic world for such a lengthy period of one-party dominance. In this paper we will (1) examine how, over a sixty-year period, political scientists have sought to explain Labour dominance in Wales; and (2) use data from the 2021 Welsh Election Study, the comprehensive survey of the Welsh electorate ever undertaken, in order to both evaluate these different explanations and advance our own explanation of 100 years of Labour dominance.

Author

• Richard Wyn Jones, Wales Governance Centre