Political

How the left/right balance of Liberal Democrat voters has changed

It is common to use two political spectrums to sort out where people or parties sit ideologically: the left-right spectrum and the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum. The latter is important in explaining the politics of the coalition’s formation, as it was a defence of civil liberties against New Labour’s post-9/11 authoritarian streak that both saw senior figures in the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives often co-operating in Parliament and also carved out a large area of policy agreement between them.

Since the coalition’s formation, its importance has rapidly dropped. Some of the reasons are straightforwardly good ones – such as delivering on several of the major civil liberties promises, including scrapping ID cards. However, it is also the case that due to the dominance of the economy as an issue, civil liberties have slipped back down the political agenda. That leaves the left-right spectrum more important once again.

It is also the spectrum that was asked about in the YouGov polling into former and current Liberal Democrat voters, about which my LDV Co-Editor Stephen Tall blogged last week and which includes a large number of people who said at the time that they were voting Lib Dem in May 2010 and have been polled again late last year, allowing comparisons to be made over time about this group.

People were asked to place themselves on a spectrum from 0 (left) to 10 (right) and for the following I have grouped people into left (0-3), centre (4-6) and right (7-10). What they show amongst Liberal Democrat voters is a shift to the centre:

Lib Dem voters in May 2010: 26% left, 47% centre, 7% right
Lib Dem voters in  Nov 2011: 16% left, 66% centre, 6% right

That drop in self-identifying left-wing voters is primarily explained by the loss of tactical voters. Of the people who said their prime reason for voting for the party in May 2010 was tactical voting, only 10% have remained Liberal Democrat supporters. Amongst those tactical voters, 34% put themselves on the left (and only 8% on the right, which matches up with the failure to squeeze further the Conservative vote in a range of key seats in the last general election).

As I talked about in my email newsletter write-up of the poll findings, a key group for the party to appeal to is the large number of people who have switched from being Liberal Democrat to ‘don’t know’. (The existence of this sizeable group also explains the systematic differences in results from different pollsters, because the way in which such don’t knows are treated is one of the major differences in their methodologies. YouGov’s methodology treats these don’t knows more harshly than ICM’s from a Lib Dem perspective, for example.)

This group, unlike the ex-tactical voters, is predominantly of the centre:

People who voted Lib Dem tactically in 2010: 34% left, 42% centre, 8% right
Ex-Lib Dems, who are now ‘don’t know’: 8% left, 48% centre, 2% right (and a huge 42% also said ‘don’t know’ to their place on left/right spectrum)

That makes for two different groups the party needs to appeal to: those who see themselves in the political centre (or don’t know where they are on the political spectrum), have been Lib Dem in the past but now don’t know who to support, and those on the centre and left who were not won over by policy promises or by Nick Clegg, but rather by bar charts and the like.

The size of this group shows why a skillful use of the tactical voting message has been so important to the party in the past (and yes, skillful means rather more than simply sticking a badly designed bar chart on a few leaflets and thinking that’s it). Even the most skilful of tactical voting campaigns is unlikely on its own to be sufficient to appeal to these people. A more sophisticated approach that marries up tactical voting with national policy achievements is needed – because the way to appeal to such tactical voters at the moment is to persuade them that a Conservative/Lib Dem coalition is better than a pure Conservative government.

* For full details of the polling dates, sample size and so on, see here and you can sign up to my monthly email newsletter about the Liberal Democrats here.

 

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