Abstract
New survey data allows us to unpack how perceptions of economic crisis, class, and objective economic deprivation vary across the UK’s political spectrum. The UK was hit by a weaker recession than Spain or Greece, but its close connection to the financial markets and unprecedented interventions by the government in the economy meant economic management was crucial. In this context, the 2015 general election occurred in the midst of austerity and the ‘weakest economic recovery in recent history’, and yet the party that presided over the implementation of austerity was voted back in with a majority. This analysis helps us disentangle the influences of hard times on voter perceptions: results suggest that one of the most important factors in the UK context was left-right ideology.
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Notes
- 1.
This rise is difficult to quantify as there is no single definition on what a ‘zero-hour’ contract is. Following the ONS definition of this kind of contract—one in which there is a lack of any guaranteed hours—between May and June 2015 there were estimated to be about 744,000 contracts of this kind, around 2.4% of the employed workforce. This was a rise from the previous year although not one which is statistically significant. It is also not clear to what extent the rise was driven by people becoming more aware of the term and whether their existing contract could be classed in this way.
- 2.
See Temple et al. (2016), for a discussion of the economic framing of the crisis and austerity in the UK, in particular how it spoke to a neoliberal narrative.
- 3.
These questions were presented on a 0–10 scale. Here, 0–4 is classed as worse, 5 as the same, and 6–10 as better.
- 4.
See Appendix for details on how these items were produced, Table A.2.2.
- 5.
The result for Spain is interesting here in that out of the nine countries in our dataset it was the second-least deprived on the individual hardship scale yet one of the countries to suffer the worst economic slowdown and rising unemployment.
- 6.
Probability calculated using the margins command in Stata. Furthermore, a number of other model specifications demonstrate no impact of the hardship and deprivation measures, such as trying to predict the 2010 vote, or the respondent vote intention if there was ‘an election held tomorrow’. Effects were also checked for by removing the existing party preference variable from the models, but the hardship variables still all failed to come anywhere near significance. Finally, whilst multicollinearity and post-estimation checks of any variance inflation showed no concerning results, an index of deprivation was created using the Cronbach’s alpha function in Stata (alpha = 0.5) to examine the effect in this way—it still failed to produce any statistically significant effects.
- 7.
Interaction effects might help explain this result; when the manual and class-perception variables are interacted, manual falls from significance, but class perception remains significant. The interaction effect is not significant; however, it does point to a potentially interesting pattern for those who work in a white-collar capacity, yet perceive themselves as working class; these respondents make up around a third of Labour voters.
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Temple, L., Grasso, M.T. (2018). Austerity, Politics, and Partisanship in the UK. In: Giugni, M., Grasso, M. (eds) Citizens and the Crisis. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68960-9_2
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