How populists win culture battles while losing the culture war

Welcome to the 148th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which takes a look at new research into culture wars, and how they impact politics.

Then it is a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings, followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis.

This time, those ten include a story from PoliticsHome who also deserve a round of applause. Their story was based on political polling from a non-British Polling Council member, and when I contacted them for a copy of the data tables, promptly asked the pollster to publish them, which they now have. (Links in the story below.) Take note, Channel 4.

This week saw another story in The Times about Gen Z, but this time - unlike that Channel 4 story - there isn’t a long critique from me. The story includes proper comparisons over time with a previous poll commissioned by The Times twenty years earlier. You can read about it here and Stephen Bush’s commentary as ever is worth reading too. (There is also here some technical discussion about how comparable the pair of polls twenty years apart are.)

Last week, I referred to an excellent article by Stephen Fisher but unfortunately the section I quoted included a small error that he has now spotted and fixed. The relevant sentence should have read, “apart from three silly elections that should not have happened (1923, 1924, and 1951),¹ all of the governments that avoided a recession or devaluation since 1922 have been re-elected.” The words “or devaluation” had been missed out, although the basic point - governments which avoid economic crises are very likely to be re-elected - holds.

Speaking of glitches, my eyebrows were gently raised this weekend by the Mail on Sunday running a poll by Find Out Now which asked the parents of 16 and 17 year olds questions about their teenagers, but then ran the results with a graphic titled “How 16 and 17 year olds said they would vote”. What a parent thinks their teenager will do and what the teenager does may not always be the same…

And with that, on with the show.

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Asymmetry and culture wars

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash.

Before my plans rather changed for what to do after my term as Lib Dem President ends on 31 December, I had been contemplating writing a new book, looking at the apparent paradox between the long-term liberalising of attitudes in Britain and the shorter term success of populists who rail against liberalisation. Given the long-term move to more liberal attitudes, why is fighting culture wars so often seen as a trap for liberals but a tactically astute move for populists?

My best go at answering that so far has been the idea of ‘two-speed liberalisation’. As I put it in an earlier edition of TWIP:

This story of [long-term] liberalisation stands at odds with the experience of politics in the last few years. It's not been an obvious good recent run for us metropolitan liberals…

The explanation for this apparent paradox is found in the excellent book Brexitland, which also pulls heavily on polling data.

It is by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford. Although they only mention ‘culture wars’ twice, the picture their detailed research produces is one of a country going through a sustained two-speed liberalisation.

Long-term and sustained demographic and social changes are making our country more liberal. But not every party of society is becoming more liberal at the same rate. As a result, although overall we’re been becoming more liberal, the gaps between how liberal people are have also widened.

That therefore serves up the paradoxical mix of both the country becoming more liberal and liberalism feeling under threat due to the increasing gaps caused by two-speed liberalisation.

Although I think this is a good working theory to reconcile (from a liberal’s perspective) long-term hope and short-term struggles, I have never felt it quite works as the whole story.

Which is where James Breckwoldt’s new research helpfully steps in. His article “Who cares about the culture war? Evidence from a vote choice conjoint experiment”² uses new polling data from the UK to conclude that, first:

The findings show that culture war issues are neither all-encompassing nor irrelevant to voters. Whilst not overriding long-standing issues, they are an additional issue group voters cared about.

In other words, culture wars have supplemented, rather than replaced, more traditional political divides.

The way they have done so, however, is lopsided:

The importance placed on culture war issues is asymmetric, consistently influencing respondents with more conservative (‘orthodox’) cultural views but holding less sway for those with more liberal (‘progressive’) cultural views.

The full article has a lot more nuance, in particular looking at the electorate divided into four camps rather than just the simple two of that quote.

But it does also provide an additional answer (with all the necessary caveats about it being just the one piece of research, based on one set of data) to that apparent long-term versus short-term paradox.

Fighting a short-term culture battle can work better for those with conservative cultural views as it motivates more those who that appeals to than it does those who it puts off.

So in the short-term you can win the culture battle, even while losing the culture war in the long-term.

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates. We have a fairly consistent pattern now of the Conservatives being in third place, though by small enough margins that we know polling is not accurate enough to be sure of the ordering.

Next, a summary of the the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster. Although Ed Davey is often omitted from coverage of these ratings, he continues to be the top performer across them all:

For more details, and updates during the week as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.

For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Catch-up: the previous two editions

Channel 4 won't release poll data, sticks by Chief Exec's claims

Gen Z, democracy and a problem with the speech from Channel 4's Chief Exec

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Who wins head-to-head ‘best Prime Minister’ comparisons? and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.

1. Polling about who the public thinks would make the best Prime Minister is generally pretty unsatisfactory these days because pollsters usually only give