Religion and voting behaviour in the 2024 General Election

Dr Ekaterina Kolpinskaya

Senior Lecturer in British Politics researching religion and politics, political representation and participation of under-represented groups, parliaments and legislatures.

Email: E.Kolpinskaya3@exeter.ac.uk

Dr Stuart Fox

Senior Lecturer in British Politics, University of Exeter

Email: S.Fox2@exeter.ac.uk

UK Election 2024

Section 2: Voters, polls and results

13. Forecasting a multiparty majoritarian election with a volatile electorate (Dr Hannah Bunting)
14. The emerging infrastructure of public opinion (Dr Nick Anstead)
15. A moving target? Voter segmentation in the 2024 British General Election (Prof Rosie Campbell)
16. Don’t vote, it only encourages them? Turnout in the 2024 Election (Prof Charles Pattie)
17. Cartographic perspectives of the 2024 General Election (Prof Benjamin Hennig)
18. Gender and vote choice: early reflections (Dr Ceri Fowler)
19. Changing Pattern amongst Muslim voters: the Labour Party, Gaza and voter volatility (Dr Parveen Akhtar)
20. Religion and voting behaviour in the 2024 General Election (Dr Ekaterina Kolpinskaya, Dr Stuart Fox)
21. Failure to connect: the Conservative Party and young voters (Dr Stephanie Luke)
22. Youthquake for the progressive left: making sense of the collapse of youth support for the Conservatives (Prof James Sloam, Prof Matt Henn)
23. Values in the valence election (Prof Paula Surridge)
24. Tactical voting: why is it such a big part of British elections? (Thomas Lockwood)

Aside from a renewed interest in Labour Party support among Muslim and Jewish voters in recent elections, religion is deemed largely irrelevant for explaining vote choice in British general elections. Rather, social class, age and education alongside national identity and social values largely explain voting and electoral outcomes. Our research has shown, however, that the ignorance of religion is misguided. Even in the era of increasing secularisation, 61 % of Britons hold religious beliefs and/or participate in religious services and/or identify with a religious – predominantly Christian – community. Historical preferences of Christian denominations for particular political parties continue to be transmitted across generations within religious communities, and religious identities and values continue to underpin social values and public opinion on salient policy issues, including Euroscepticism and national identity. 

The 2024 General Election is no exception: there were clear patterns of party support by religion. Using a survey fielded by YouGov on 5-8 July, we can see that Labour’s and especially the Liberal Democrats’ electoral support is unsurprisingly strong among the religiously unaffiliated voters, who amount to 56% and 58% of their supporters in this election. By contrast, Anglicans remain core Conservative supporters, with 40% of the Conservative electoral support coming from this denomination. While Reform voters tend to be non-religious, they have some success with Anglicans too. 

Historically, the Conservative Party has dominated the ‘Anglican vote’, and since the 1980s has seen its support among Anglicans increase relative to its support in the wider electorate. This trend continued in the 2024 election: despite its dramatic loss of support across the country, the Tories continued to enjoy strong support from its traditional religious base, with 45% of Anglicans voting Conservative on 4 July. Labour, meanwhile, has increasingly become detached from its own traditional religious base, largely made up of Roman Catholics. Since the 1980s, Catholic support for Labour has eroded and shifted towards the Conservatives: this trend also continued in the 2024 election, with 32% of Catholics backing Labour.

The erosion of Labour’s Roman Catholic vote and consolidation of the Conservative support among Anglicans since the 1980s is illustrated in the figure below. It shows the difference in support for the largest parties in Britain between the Anglicans and Catholics, and the wider electorate. In 2024, for example, the Conservative’s support among Anglicans was 21 points higher than its support in the electorate as a whole, while its support among Catholics was 5 points higher – a new high for both groups and showing that the consolidation of Britain’s Christian vote behind the Conservatives is continuing despite the party’s disastrous election performance. By contrast, the 13 percentage point gap between Roman Catholics and all voters in their support for Labour evidence in 1983 has steadily dropped down to zero in 2024. In other words, Labour have lost any advantage among Roman Catholics – the second largest religious denomination in Britain amounting to 8% of the population, while the Conservatives – contrary to country-wide trends – managed to significantly increase theirs among Anglicans who constitute almost a quarter of the population.

These findings align with our analyses of Understanding Society data that are available from the authors upon request. They show that religious identification has strong, statistically significant effects on voting preferences. Anglicans are consistently drawn to the Conservative Party, while Roman Catholic – once a powerhouse for the Labour Party – remain moderately supportive of it even now. These effects hold even when accounting for previous partisan attachments, interest in politics, ethnicity, English national identity, age, sex, education, social class, marital status, region of residence, and financial circumstances. Not only is religion an important determinant of vote choice in its own right, but it is a highly stable one: between the 2010 and 2019 elections, for example, the Conservative’s support among Anglicans was highly stable: almost nine in ten did not waver in their preference for the part; in contrast, almost one in five of the religiously unaffiliated changed who they voted for at least once between those four elections.

Taken together these analyses show that religious identification remains an important predictor of voting and continued to shape how people voted in the 2024 election. Religion can be an anchor against wider changes that push voters away from their traditional party, and cushioning the blow of dramatic election defeats, as happened to the Conservatives with their Anglican support base in this election. Religion can be a driver of political realignment, as religiously held identities and values push people away from their traditional party – as happened to Labour among some of its Muslim voters in this campaign with dramatic results, and as can be seen in the steady shift of Catholic support away from Labour and towards the Conservatives.