I was reminded the other day when this tweet
popped in my twitter/X feed of a previous post, For Whom the Bell Tolls, that I made back in October 2022. So I revisited the post and the comments and, I’m sorry to say, what I found is nearly all cope. We can always quibble about the questions, analysis, etc. involved in a piece of research but the graphs for both the US and UK broadly track reality and we can see this because the party affiliations align with dimensions measured on the graph. There is just no point pretending otherwise unless you want to avoid reality and the practical lessons entailed therein. We need to stop ignoring that there is little interest in ‘right wing’ economic policies that are justified in terms of right-wing values that are anymore than moderate. That is just the reality; the vast bulk of the electorate sits within the left-centre of the economic values spectrum and so they must be addressed at the very least in that idiom if you want to attract their consideration and support. The same is true re social values except that here we can say that a supermajority of the electorate is situated here, as is the overwhelming majority of the conversative electorate, precisely where you would expect the latter to be, in the upper half of the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. The only reason why we or the party apparatus could or would ignore either or both is ideological. This is instructive.
Addendum: This is how the traditional left-right axis appears on the political quadrant:
Which is almost in centre of Brexit voters’ values.
That’s a fun chart.
Slight typo though, he has the arrows and year dates on the wrong ends of the lines.
I’m also amused that Nigel Farage-supporting Brexit voters are to the left of Stalin.
Surely the guy who did the chart could get a nice juicy job doing climate data. They’d grab him immediately! Talent! Lots of money in that field these days.
Looks like 95% of voters are letwingers no matter what they call themselves. No wonder the place is a dump. Pathetic.
I see the coping continues.
No, Brexit voters hold economic values across the left-centre spectrum with the mean being centre-left. And what distinguishes the Brexit voter from the Lab & Lib Dem is that they are social conservative.
You’re not reading the graph correctly. The left-right spectrum would be a line drawn from the bottom left corner to the top right so any to the right of top left and bottom right would be right-wing. In that light it’s split more or less evenly.
Are you able to source the questions asked that determined where people stood on issues? I’ve seen a good number of these surveys and the questions are mostly shit awful and don’t really describe voter thinking. You may recall quite a few of these tests were discussed on the old Cat and people were very critical.
That chart’s Y-scale is all messed up.
Progressives are the most totalitarian these days.
The libertarians are closer to the conservatives.
Maybe it needs 3 dimensions.
The questions aim to identify economic and social values. There are always issues re questions but it’s clear from the results, as I say in the post, broadly align with voter identification. Sure, you could probably sharpen the questions but this isn’t going to radically alter the results.
Why is this so difficult to accept?
Haha.
The section that Brexit voters are supposed to be is far left-authoritarian. That is Stalinism. It’s ludicrous.
The chart is the most stupid rendition of stupid crap data I’ve ever seen in fifty years of processing data. In short it is elephant sh*t, since it’s worse and smellier than bullsh*t.
It is not coping to reject false data, and this data is off the planet false.
Second comment is that the Conservatives and Labour are supposed to have moved massively rightwards in three years. That’s bonkers.
The Tories under Rishi have gone so far left since he was gonged as leader by the elites that they’re now a mainstream green-progressive party these days. And Labour have gone even further left: they’re a bunch of antisemitic communists.
So to suggest both parties have hurdled rightwards is about as ludicrous as you can think of.
Perhaps the guy just got his axes arse about. I haven’t seen such a silly graph in a long long time, and as a scientist I have seen a lot of graphs.
You’ve misread the graph, Bruce, I can’t put it any plainer than that. I’ve added an addendum to help you and others. Brexit voters, firstly, have economic values that overlap considerably with Conservative voters, and secondly, have economic values that traverse the left and centre. And this tracks with what we learned of Brexit voters back in 2015/16, that they were largely Labour voters in the midlands and north that had been increasingly marginalised by Blairism. These are well-understood facts.
No, the Y-scale is perfectly fine. Libertarians are not closer to conservatives on social questions. Hopefully, the addendum is useful for you and others reading the graph.
Mmm…looks interesting.
I’ll be able to give it more time tomorrow.
D.v.
Um, the Y axis says “authoritarian” and the X axis says “Left wing”. The entirety of the supposed Brexit demographic is between those two axes. That is insane. It is wrong. The Brexit demo pretty much coincides with the US MAGA demo. Right wing conservatives based solidly on Christian morals and ethos.
I think that is all perfectly clear and the graph is perfectly off the face of the planet with bells, whistles and pink flying elephants. I wish I knew what he was using because it sure is powerful stuff.
I am not in the habit of misreading graphs, rather it has been my job and calling for forty years to interpret data and graphs to determine whether they are true. This one is so dumb it would make Dumbo the Flying Elephant embarrassed.
It’s not difficult to accept, but we need to see the questions backing this result.
We used to go over lots of these surveys in the old Cat and the general view was that most were next to useless as the questions weren’t properly crafted.
Have a look at the result with basically ~2/5ths of Labor voters residing in the top left quartile of the chart suggesting they’re less authoritarian than conservative voters. That’s baloney.
You then have ~3/5ths of labor voters residing in the bottom left quartile suggesting they have libertarian values. A quick scan of the UK libertarian party manifesto would show this is crap.
Ok here are the two necessary changes to that abortion of a dataset.
First the top and bottom tags should be rearranged. The top one should say “Libertarian/traditional social values” and the bottom should say “Authoritarian/progressive social values” since those reflect the current division in society. The progressives are the authoritarians and the conservatives are the libertarians.
Secondly the entire Brexit and Conservative voters blobs should be in the top right hand side, since those demos reflect conventional free market capitalist viewpoints. They sure don’t reflect Marxist-socialist economic outlooks as the chart says they do. Tradies for example are as free market capitalist as they come, they aren’t frigging commie totalitarians.
Now further, the left wing blobs should be brought fully into the authoritarian/left wing sector, since the Left is completely authoritarian-totalitarian. They aren’t a single iota libertarian. Completely intolerant of counter viewpoints.
I’ll repeat myself: this is the stupidest lefty “graph” that I’ve ever seen in many decades of watching stupid lefties being stupid. It makes the infamous Hockey Stick look almost plausible, which it entirely isn’t.
Yeah, I’d like to see how they work the party aspect on this political quadrant as well as the scales on both axes. But none of this means that the graphs are broadly inaccurate. These graphs are simply indicative of the economic and social values in and of the electorate. The UK and the US political quadrants are broadly similar and illustrate what occurred in the Brexit vote and in 2016. There is simply no way around these facts.
No Dover the graph and the claimed directions are completely unbelievable.
The Conservative Party has been sprinting leftwards under Sunak. Not rightwards. Truss tried to turn it around but the elites ejected her and inserted Sunak without a vote.
And no the graph does not reflect the US voting patterns or social dynamics either. Trump supporters for example are libertarians and conservative Christians with classical laissez faire economic outlook. The authoritarian thing is a fever dream of the Left, and intense projection since they’re the totalitarians.
As for the Labour Party you obviously haven’t been watching the news. They are full on Corbynists these days: communist antisemites. The UK is going to be so screwed after the election. Ah well. Got to have another learning experience before they have a hope of regaining any national sanity.
I’m not saying we’re any better here, since we aren’t. Only about a decade behind the US and the UK.
Freedom of speech?
No, firstly, it’s ‘authoritarian/traditional’, and secondly, Trump won by winning over Reagan/Blue Dog Democrats and the right portion that otherwise avoids voting; pretty much similar to who Brexit won over in 2016.
No, the majority of conservative voters would have centrist economic values. They are going to be supportive of individual initiative, private enterprise, limited intervention, and moderate welfare for the needy. Brexit voters will also largely do so as well.
The blobs are where they are because that is where the answers they have given have placed them on the political quadrant. They are ‘libertarian’ on abortion, divorce, promiscuity, and the like, however much you may dislike that characterisation.
That is only because you’re not reading it in its terms but on your terms. Authoritarian here just means traditional on social values. How is this not clear?
Same as above.
Dover
Labor supporters don’t reside there. Can you get the questionnaire?
You’ve seen enough of these bullshit surveys to raise the antenna, but you’re accepting it blindly.
This isn’t looking at the Conservatives under Sunak.
Yes they do.
If you have an FT sub try here, otherwise google British Election Study, but it can’t be much different than the US version here.
I see that years of being nagged, abused and accused of being “statists” has conservative cats convinced that libertarians aren’t socially located alongside the spastic bleeding progressives.
Have you forgotten the years of being lectured to by these dunderheads about everything from gay marriage to open borders lunacy to drug decriminalisation.
How badly are some of you idiots suffering from Stockholm syndrome?
Not a good graph at all. I reiterate that 95$ are lefties, the ones above the horizontal line are Chardonnay Socialists. The English have always liked authoritarianism, the Upper Class knowing whats good for everyone else and the Lower Classes grizzling about but still want to move up the ladder.
95%
Lefties skew it 45 degrees to try to make libertarians non-existent.
Lefties only constitute 95% of this graph if you ignore the social values Y-axis.
so basically everybody is left-wing economic and has authoritarian social values
explains a lot
and anyway, who chose those colours?
they should all be lined up and shot along with the people responsible for taking butter out of sandwiches
While libertarians exist, they are marginal, existing on the political periphery.
“No Dover the graph and the claimed directions are completely unbelievable.”
It might be moe believable if they had normalised the results about both axia.
Missed this yesterday:
Makes no sense. The one’s above the horizontal line around the Y-axis are in the Australian context Menzies’s forgotten people. They are mixed economy supporters that have traditional social values.
The most populist and influential Western government policy of the 20th century was the New Deal. They had to change the US Constitution so that FDR wasn’t President for life, it made him so popular.
I would question the label of authoritarian on the Y axis. Perhaps a better characterisation would be “interventionist”, referring to government intervening in the economy and social issues. Perhaps it is just semantics, but Stalinism is not actually on that graph at all as an option, and using the word authoritarian lets Dunning-Kruger specials like Bruce pretend that it is.
To me, the lesson of this graph is that no one wants laissez-faire free market capitalism, except the capitalists who run the show. The choice should mostly be between technocrat progress or NIMBY nativism as the guiding ideology of government intervention. The fact that libertarianism is even existent at all among the elected class is an aspect of the chokehold veto power that capital has over the political process, enabled by rubbish law like Citizens United.
What would this achieve apart from the pretense of precision. The graph is indicative; it is telling you in broad outline the positions of the electorate in terms of its economic and social values.
Nearly all I’m seeing in this thread is cope rather than coming to terms with the electorate as it is.
I’m not convinced by the addendum – need to think more.
FT analysed the data from the British Election Study, so you data wonks can go for it.
The capitalists “who run the show” are not laissez-faire free market types but cronies who benefit from government intervention in the marketplace.
So they are pretty much like the electorate too.
What are you having trouble with?
It’s debatable how much the electorate benefits from government intervention in the market, although they may think they do. Which is to say the real interests of big business and the general public are often at odds.
But that isn’t at issue, Roger. The issue is the location of the electorate, broadly speaking, and when I look at the graph it looks like a gold mine bonanza for an actually conservative party.
I mentioned on an OT last week that Reform is polling only 1 or 2 pts behind the Tories.
Dover, I don’t buy the left/libertarian-social right/authoritarian-social correlation.
It may have aligned in the past, but the last few years have brought out the leftist social moralist jackboots. Just the ‘morals’ have shifted.
What’s the other axis supposed to represent? Social control top left vs. laissez-faire bottom right?
Depends on what you mean by conservatism.
If you think it means taking away rights, reversing decades of multicultural enrichment, dismantling cultural institutions, cutting green tape that is preventing rapacious corporate exploitation of the environment, and removing common law consumer protections… those are not actually popular.
I would argue that that is not actual conservatism, but reactionary recidivism. To be conservative, the thing you are conserving has to actually exist. The world you want, db, no longer exists. You want to tear down modern society. You are the opposite of a conservative.
mUnturd
The change was made after FDR was dead.
You are an ignorant fool.
mUnturd
The most “rapacious corporate exploitation of the environment” these days is by renewable rent seekers, clear felling trees for wind factories and covering productive farmland with solar panels.
No, it doesn”t if you are paying attention to the electorate as it presents itself. Conservative voters, on the Y-axis are all moderately or significantly socially conservative. And, further what worries you even more is that a good deal of Labour and Lib Dem voters are also moderately or significantly socially conservative.
So, as I said, these are, to employ another metaphor, rich, fertile soils for any actually conservative party to cultivate. Black volcanic soil, you could say.
Read Roger Scruton.
helps if you think of the quadrants as paddocks
open a gate and get the first ones moving then the rest will follow
mUnty playing the ‘equivocation’ game again?
of course he need not wonder how the grass got greener
or how the system of gates and paddock operates
just trust that greener is better
I suppose that getting fat in a big green paddock is a birth-right in a ‘modern’ society
At the end of the day, this graph is a scam and it is malinformation, evil and dishonest propaganda.
They’re saying Brexit voters are like Hitler and Stalin and the conservatives and even the Lib Dems are that way inclined.
This is a complete falsehood. They’re all trending down 45 degrees on the axis bisecting the lower right quadrant [the good part where moral and rational people exist].
Corbyn, Wong and our Greens, along with the worst COVID authoritarians are at the extreme corner value of the upper left quadrant [the bad part where evil and irrational people ‘exist’].
Reply to dot above:
The graph is not saying this at all. It is saying that Brexit voters, Conservatives, Lib Dems, and Labour voters harbour economic values that are strongly left to moderately right with the mean somewhere on the centre-Left. In UK, this is probably a historical artifact of cradle to grave social services in the immediate post-WW2 period, NHS, and the like. The same graph for the US, which broadly follows this graph simply has more spread for conservative voters in respect of economic values, but the mean, rather than being moderately left, is marginally right on economic values. While the mean on social values for Dems is strongly progressive/ libertarian, whereas for both UK and US conservatives are both substantively conservative on social values, with the US being maybe being marginally stronger.
As for where people, better or worse ‘exist’, both graphs say that very few people exist in the bottom right, most exist in the left half, the top right constitutes a substantial minority, and the game is won in the top left quadrant.
I’m going with Dot. Anyway, it looks like horseshit. Not even a smidgen of any of the bubbles touched the bottom right quad. There are neither libertarians nor classic liberals in the UK. Okay.
Here’s an example of the problem that I think you were even involved with at the old Cat.
On one of those surveys we discussed, there was a question as to whether you supported abortion. If you answered no, your answer would have carried you towards the top left quad. It’s a little more complex than that, though. You could still be against abortion, but don’t support a ban.
Skull!
Why ignore the fact that the UK graph broadly replicates the US graph? The only difference is that the UK graph probably cleans up most of the scatter that you see on the periphery in the US map, and the US maps show that the population in the bottom right quadrant is marginal, and that whatever is there resides in the top left of the bottom right quadrant (these are the right-liberals/ classical liberals). It’s just cope to ignore this.
Without knowing if the axes were the same as these graphs, its obvious why answering the question in support of an abortion in the negative placed you north of the line, because the graph judges such an answer as indicative of authoritarian/ traditional social values. As to whether that is a mistake, no, it isn’t. It is identifying your social values, it isn’t predicting how you might equivocate regarding your social values at the level of policy.