Prof Paula Surridge
Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol and Deputy Director at UK in a Changing Europe. She has been studying the British Electorate for thirty years, beginning with the 1992 Scottish Election Study and with a focus on social and political values.
Email: P.Surridge@bristol.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)
In 2019 the Conservative party led by Boris Johnson united a coalition of voters around the slogan ‘Get Brexit done’, it was the third election in four years to be fought on the battleground of Brexit and to split the electorate along the underlying values and identity divides that Brexit had brought to the fore.
The 2024 Election could not be more different. This was an election first and foremost driven by a verdict on the performance of the Conservative government. Competence, leadership, and delivery are the key elements of ‘valence’ politics. These political battles are fought not over what the outcomes should be – everyone wants to see lower inflation and shorter waiting lists – but rather who is best placed to deliver them. The Conservatives were failing on all of them.
As the public went to the polls, the government was seen by more than two-thirds of voters as incompetent and over the course of the 18 months since his election as party leader, Rishi Sunak’s personal ratings had also been eroded. This was a government that more than four-fifths of the popular were dissatisfied with and that two-thirds said did not deserve to be re-elected.
It is then, no surprise that the party lost almost twenty percentage points from its 2019 vote share. What is more difficult to explain in terms of valence politics alone is where those voters went. What voters want and who they think are best placed to deliver it depend not only on evaluations of parties but also on the priorities of the electorate. Or to put it another way, competence evaluations may have broken the Conservative coalition apart, but the value positions of the electorate influence the size and shape of the resulting pieces.
The Conservatives lost votes (and seats) in four directions. The traditional ‘swing’ vote that went to the Labour party. Voters in seats in the South of England that went to the Liberal Democrats. The larger but less electorally successful group that went to Reform UK and a much smaller but nonetheless important group that voted for the Green party.
Using data from just before the campaign from the British Election study internet panel we can look at the priorities different groups of voters had prior to the agenda setting of the campaign itself. Those moving from the Conservatives to Labour and the Liberal Democrats are quite similar, both groups say the economy is the most important issue facing the country, and in both groups, immigration is a much lower priority. In comparison among those moving to Reform UK, immigration is the most important issue of a substantial majority, with only a small group placing the economy first. Finally, those moving from Conservative to the Green party are much more likely than other groups to say the environment is the most important issue though even among this group the economy is a slightly higher priority.
This makes for a set of difficult challenges for the Conservatives in the coming parliament. While the party must rebuild its reputation for economic competence to again be seen as a viable party of government, this is difficult in opposition for as long as the Labour government retains the trust of the public on economic issues.
But this alone may not be enough to rebuild a winning coalition while voters are also fragmenting along other lines. If the Labour government is judged to have handled immigration well this might dampen the salience for the next election, but if it is judged to have handled it poorly that could add fuel to the Reform UK campaign rather than return voters to the Conservatives.
Chasing the Reform UK vote on issues such as immigration and net zero, does nothing to reconnect with voters lost to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, in fact it could push them further away. Pursuing the ‘low taxation’ voter may be equally problematic. Those who have moved from the Conservatives to Labour and the Liberal Democrats are to the left economically than those who stayed with the Conservatives, and to the left of the Conservative MPs at Westminster.
The Conservative party lost heavily because it was extremely unpopular, seen as incompetent and could not please any of the parts of the voter coalition it had assembled in 2019. To win again it will need to build a new coalition of voters, but the fragments of the old coalition don’t easily fit back together.
It may be that the fragmented electorate is here to stay, posing new challenges at each election for any party seeking to find a winning hand, but for all parties the key is understanding the voter groups as they exist in the electorate rather than chasing mirages of the electorate they would prefer.
