Introduction

National identities have long been seen as a key factor in shaping political behaviour. In the British context, the importance of national identities was turbocharged by the establishment of devolution to Scotland and Wales, the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union. There is now a rich sub-field exploring questions of English, Welsh and Scottish identity and their relationship with Britishness, with it becoming increasingly clear that British identity means different things across different parts of the United Kingdom (Henderson 2021).

Despite this welcome progress in understanding how national identities influence voting behaviour, political science still largely neglects one key element of an individual’s sense of self: their local identity. This study begins to fill that lacuna through an examination of the Scouse identity. The Scouse identity is rooted in Liverpool, a city in the county of Merseyside in the north-west of England. While there are many historical, social and cultural studies of the Scouse identity, this article represents the first time the Scouse identity has been subject to a political science analysis.

This article makes three key contributions to the literature. First, it shows how holding a local identity can have politically salient consequences when it comes to voting behaviour. Second, it offers proof that local identities can matter just as much as, if not more than, national identities when it comes to shaping political behaviour. Third, it places the political consequences of the Scouse identity within a broader comparative context alongside Englishness, Welshness and Scottishness.

Literature review

The idea that identities might be important for understanding voting behaviour in the UK is not new. In post-war Britain class was seen as the main salient identity for determining voting behaviour, epitomized by Pulzer’s famous quip “Class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail” (Pulzer 1967, p. 98). But even then around 25% of British voters did not vote along class lines (Abramson 1972, p. 1291), and a steady, long-term process of class dealignment has weakened class-based voting to the point where, in 2001, “class effects on voting were negligible” (Clarke et al. 2004, 317). In the 2019 general election, Labour performed equally well among ‘middle-class’ ABC1 and ‘working-class’ C2DE voters (33%), whilst the Conservatives performed better among working-class voters than middle-class voters (48% to 43% respectively) (YouGov 2019a).

Alongside this development, other identities have become increasingly important across the United Kingdom. The first is in Scotland, where the Unionist/independence identity cleavage reshaped Scottish politics following the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. By the time of the 2019 general election, 97% of Conservative voters, 70% of Labour voters, and 94% of Liberal Democrat voters opposed independence, while 90% of the SNP’s supporters backed independence (YouGov 2019b).Footnote 1

Like the Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union also created new identities—commonly referred to as ‘leavers’ and ‘remainers’—which also reflected divides already emerging in British society (Jennings and Stoker 2017; Hobolt et al. 2020).

Although there were no labels for either side until the campaign itself, voters developed a strong sense of their own Brexit identity. Eighteen months after the referendum around three-quarters of people identified as leavers or remainers, roughly the same percent who identified with a political party, but the strength of their Brexit identification was greater (Hobolt et al. 2020). In December 2021, over 5 years after the referendum campaign, 41% of the public had a ‘very strong’ remain or leave identity, compared to just 18% who had a very strong party identity (Ipsos 2021).

Place is central to identity and hence voting behaviour. Jennings and Stoker argue that England is divided between cosmopolitan areas which are global in outlook and pluralistic in their identity, and ‘provincial backwaters’ where Euroscepticism and anti-immigration sentiment is higher, people are attitudinally illiberal, and are more likely to identify as English rather than British (Jennings and Stoker 2016, 2017). This is a trend which began before, but was accelerated by, the EU referendum.

Immediately after the referendum ‘left behind’ became the buzz phrase du jour, referring to “the cities, towns and regions located beyond the large and successful agglomerations that had become the sites of economic growth in the twenty-first century” (Leyshon 2021), and the higher-than-average support for leave in these areas was cast as ‘the revenge of the forgotten’, against both the establishment and, due to claims these areas were now increasingly Conservative-leaning, Labour too (Labour’s alleged abandonment of these left-behind voters began as far back as 1994 with the creation of New Labour).

The left-behind thesis has been criticised from numerous angles, including for ignoring ethnic minority leave voters (Martin et al. 2019), the conflation of economic and cultural phenomena (Calvert Jump and Michell 2021), the statistical evidence that the most economically deprived areas, and voters, still tended to vote Labour (when they actually did vote) (Furlong 2019), and that deprivation was only weakly correlated with voting to leave (Calvert Jump and Michell 2021). Despite this, the idea of the left-behind voter shaped the ideas of policy wonks and politicians alike, including prime ministers Theresa May (through tackling the ‘burning injustices’ within society) and Boris Johnson (by ‘levelling up’ the country).

Following the 2019 general election, however, ‘left behind’ has been replaced by the ‘red wall’ as the key realignment in British (although really English and, to a lesser extent, Welsh) politics. The red wall refers to a number of seats across the north of England, the Midlands, and North Wales where, based on constituency demographics, the Conservative Party historically underperformed and the Labour Party had been dominant (Kanagasooriam and Simon 2021). Many of these seats saw large swings to the Conservatives in the 2017 general election and fell to the Conservatives in 2019. For some, the ‘red wall’ and ‘left behind’ areas overlap (Cooper and Cooper 2020), whereas for others ‘left behind’ represents something closer to a state of mind, or way of seeing the world, whereas the red wall is a geographic descriptor.

The political salience of traditional national identities has also received increased attention. The UK is a multi-national state, and so how those national identities operate (and inter-operate) is of vital importance to understanding political trends. As McCrone notes, “National identity relates to political behaviour and attitudes, but not in a straightforward way… We should think of national identity as a frame for understanding, not as a determinant of how people vote” (McCrone 2020). Like with other identities, national identities shape possibilities, rather than determining outcomes.

Scottish and Welsh national identities have been brought into focus with the introduction of devolution, whilst Englishness has received increasing attention due to broader issues surrounding the West Lothian question, a perceived lack of ‘English’ institutions to mirror the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and the relative strength of the leave vote in England. Additionally, and unsurprisingly, the European identity increased in political salience following the Brexit vote. There was even a campaign to ‘declare yourself European’ on the 2021 census (Stay European 2021).Footnote 2

The Scottish independence referendum reconfigured politics along a sharper Unionist/independence identity cleavage, again turbocharging processes already in motion. However, the concept of Scottishness was used by both sides of the independence debate at the time (Keating and McEwen 2020), and has been so since (McCrone 2020). Analysis of the EU referendum result in Scotland found that both Scottish and British identifiers voted remain in equal proportions, and that whilst all major parties had majority support for remain, the two parties with the largest leave minorities were the Conservatives (45%) and the SNP (37%) (McCrone 2020).

Unlike in Scotland, where remain was the clear winner in the referendum with 62% of the vote, the result in Wales was closer. Wales voted to leave the European Union by 52.5% to 47.5%, and Welsh identity played a role in structuring voting behaviour. Among voters who identified as Welsh only 29% voted to leave, whereas among those who saw themselves as Welsh British the figure was 58% (Wyn Jones and Larner 2021). In addition, unlike in Scotland, where Conservative Unionism was able to establish itself and where Labour’s dominance only really began in 1964, Wales has always been electorally lopsided, being first dominated by the Liberal Party and then the Labour Party (Wyn Jones and Scully 2006; Blaxland 2020). Indeed, Labour has won every general election in Wales since 1922.

Historically, the political salience of Englishness has been muted, subsumed into a wider sense of Britishness. However an IPPR report in 2012 found evidence of the emergence of an ‘English political community’, marked by

notable concerns within England about the seeming privileges of Scotland, in particular, in a devolved UK, a growing questioning of the capacity of the current UK-level political institutions to pursue and defend English interests, and one underpinned by a deepening sense of English identity (Wyn Jones et al. 2012, 2).

For these authors, this English political community had emerged as a ‘backlash’ against the establishment of the devolved institutions in Scotland and Wales.

Unlike the Scottish and Welsh identity, however, Englishness does not seem to be linked to demands for an English parliament. Henderson outlines the tension at the heart of English nationalism: “England is too big to accommodate by itself, the English want England to be accommodated by itself, but not necessarily with an English Parliament” (Henderson et al. 2021). Englishness also has an image problem among cultural elites. As Kenny notes, “For many commentators, Englishness is irretrievably tainted by its regressive, conservative, and ethnically charged character” (Kenny 2014). Whereas Scottishness, Welshness, and Britishness are seen as cuddly and civic, Englishness is not. For Kenny, this is rooted in Thatcherite conservatism, which “ensured that progressives became increasingly wary of Anglicized expressions of nationhood, and opted to identify instead with the nationalisms emerging in Scotland and Wales, and, in the 1990s, with the civic liberalism associated with Britishness” (Kenny 2014). This phenomenon also plays out in Liverpool’s cultural space, with the Scouse identity contrasted positively against the English identity (Jeffery 2021, 2023).

Henderson and Wyn Jones note how Britishness means different things in different parts of Britain, and that “many of the attitudes that attach to Englishness in England attach to Britishness in Scotland and Wales” (Henderson et al. 2021, p. 6). For some, the fact Britishness “has been construed differently in different parts of the state… is the genius of traditional unionism” (Keating and McEwen 2020) whereas for others it is problematic: is such a Janus-faced identity robust enough to heal the divides caused by the Scottish independence or EU referenda?

One final difference between Welshness, Scottishness, and Englishness is related to party choice. In the 2021 Senedd election, the more Welsh a respondent felt, relative to feeling British, the more likely they were to vote for Plaid Cymru and the less likely they were to vote Conservative (Larner et al. 2022). Fieldhouse et al. find that, among 2010 Labour voters, Scottishness was not statistically significant in predicting an SNP vote before the Scottish independence referendum but it was afterwards (Fieldhouse et al. 2019, Table A8.3). Polling in April 2014 for the European Parliament elections found that those who identified as either ‘English only’ or ‘More English than British’ were more likely to vote for UKIP, whereas those who felt ‘British only’ or ‘More British than English’ were more likely to support Labour. The Conservatives were more likely to be chosen by those who saw themselves as ‘Equally English and British’ (Cardiff University 2014).

Cornishness is another example of an identity that has received academic attention. The Cornish were recognised as a national minority in April 2014, but unlike England, Scotland, and Wales, Cornwall is not a country within the UK, but rather a county of England. In the 2021 census 14% of people living in Cornwall reported a Cornish identity (~ 80,000 people) and 1.6% of people (~ 9000) defined themselves as Cornish in combination with one or more UK identities (BBC News 2022). Geographically, the Cornish identity strengthens the further west one goes—that is, further away from the rest of England. It is perhaps unsurprising that a distinct Cornish identity developed and has persisted, given Cornwall’s geography: it is surrounded by the sea to the north, south, and west, and the River Tamar all but separates Cornwall from Devon to the east.

Deacon (2013) argues that the Cornish identity rests on three foundations. Firstly, there is a “package of behaviours, attitudes and attributes associated with being ‘Cornish’”, including a preference for certain types of music, for rugby over football [as well as distinctive versions of hurling and wrestling (Seward 1998; Porter 2014)], for pasties or saffron buns, a particular accent and/or dialect, and “even an indefinable sense of humour”. There are clear parallels to the Scouse identity here, namely the Beatles, the importance of football rather than rugby, the Scouse stew, the Scouse accent, and the irreverent sense of humour.

Secondly, the Cornish language is important to Cornish cultural identity, which does not apply to Scouse identity formation but for which the Scouse accent can offer something of a substitute. Thirdly, there is a certain interpretation of Cornish history: “Not the past, which doesn’t change. But the stories told about that past, which do”, with Cornish history currently going through a nationalist revisionist phase (Deacon 2013). This also has significant parallels with the Scouse identity, especially in terms of the narratives surrounding Liverpool Council’s conflict with the Thatcher government in the 1980s, the consequences of the Hillsborough disaster, and how the post-Hillsborough boycott of the Sun has strengthened, rather than weakened, as time has passed (Foos and Bischof 2022). Even Liverpool’s history is often portrayed as a struggle against the authority of capital or central government, when in reality Liverpool was historically a bastion of Protestant unionism, support for the Empire, and Conservative voting (Jeffery 2023).

However, as with the study of local identities, the attention paid to Cornishness is largely historical or cultural rather than political or psephological, but with some notable exceptions. Firstly, Willett and Tredinnick-Rowe (2016) note that “economic regionalism has provided a space for the articulation of national identities” in a way that did not exist within the traditional Westminster unitary system. Building on this, Willett et al. (2019) explored the reasons that—unlike other Celtic nations—Cornwall voted to leave the European Union (56.5% to 43.5% remain), despite receiving high levels of EU structural funds. They found that citizens in Cornwall saw the allocation of funds as an elite-driven process only benefiting elites, which in turn reinforced the perceived remoteness of the EU and its institutions.

One study, by Winter (2023), does attempt to explore the political and attitudinal profile of Cornwall. Using a technique called coarsened exact matching (Iacus et al. 2012), Winter isolates the effect of living in Cornwall (relative to living in the rest of England) on 18 political variables. He finds that those living in Cornwall are more likely to support the Liberal Democrats—reflecting the Liberal Party’s historic strength on the ‘Celtic fringes’—and have lower trust in the Westminster government (although this is linked to disproportionately lower levels of Conservative Party support, the governing party at the time). There is also higher support for protecting the environment and for the Green Party, as well as being economically left-wing. Interestingly, people in Cornwall are not less likely to define themselves as English or British despite the existence of the Cornish identity, a point which is supported by Willett (2008), who finds that the Cornish identity can and does co-exist with the English identity.

However, in the three pieces referenced above the dependent variable is people living in Cornwall, rather than whether an individual identifies as Cornish, and so the impact of holding the Cornish identity cannot be reliably established. Thus, whilst it is clear that national identities matter, and that they are now receiving increased academic interest, the same attention is not yet being paid to the political consequences of local identities. There is no need to be overly prescriptive about the exact level of ‘localness’—politically salient identities can operate on the parish level, the city level, the city-region level, or the regional level.

There have been a handful of recent high-profile attempts to mobilise sub-national identity groups in the political sphere, with limited success. These include Mebyon Kernow in Cornwall (Cornish for ‘Sons of Cornwall’), the Yorkshire Party, and the Northern Independence Party, but there has been next to no attempt to explore which local identities may have political salience or how these identities are linked to party choice.Footnote 3 One study sought to explore the role of local (as well as national) identities on support for metro mayors, finding that while a relationship did exist between holding a Scouse identity and supporting the Liverpool City Region metro mayor position in a bivariate model with controls, this relationship disappeared in the study's full model. In this study, place mattered more than identity (Jeffery 2022a).

The Scouse identity

This study is the first to measure the political salience of a local identity. The Scouse identity is a good case study to use because it is a clear example of local identity that is often portrayed as politically salient (see Jeffery 2017, 2023; Wilks-Heeg 2019). The Scouse identity is rooted in Liverpool, which is part of the county of Merseyside in the north-west of England, alongside the council areas of Knowsley and St Helens to the east, Sefton to the north, and the Wirral to the west, across the River Mersey. The most recent study of the Scouse identity was undertaken by Jeffery (2023), who examined the identity’s politicisation in the context of Conservative electoral decline.

Hobolt et al.’s work on opinion-based groups is relevant in understanding how the Scouse identity became politicised. Jeffery’s core argument is that the Scouse identity became politicised during the stand-off over local government funding that occurred between Liverpool Council—then run by a Labour Party controlled by the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist entryist organisation—and the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher (for a full account of the period, see Crick 2016). Hobolt et al. argue that “Opinion-based groups emerge in the context of salient intergroup comparisons—that is, situations in which people are compelled to take sides on an issue. Prior research suggests that such identities may emerge, or crystallize, in response to dramatic events, such as wars or man-made disasters… they can also emerge from politically engineered events” (Hobolt et al. 2020). Although the Militant-Thatcher conflict was not as dramatic as a war, it was as vitriolic, if not moreso, than the EU referendum.

The conflict imbued in the Scouse identity a negative partisanship toward the Conservative Party, explored in the analysis below, but which is often mistaken for a pro-Labour partisanship (a point disproved by the fact the Liberal Democrats ran Liverpool City Council from 1998 to 2010, and the party’s subsequent lack of success was due to the national Liberal Democrat party entering into a coalition with the Conservatives in Westminster).

Liverpool’s reputation hit its nadir in the 1980s (for a fuller history of this, see Jeffery 2023, Chap. 8), but as it recovered and as people moved out of the city and into its environs, Merseyside began a process of becoming increasingly more Scouse, although this has been an uneven process (Wilks-Heeg 2019).

Figure 1 shows the geographic distribution of the Scouse identity across the five council areas comprising Merseyside, using original survey data commissioned by the author and described in the data and methodology section. The map on the left shows the percent of people responding ‘yes’ to the question ‘Do you consider yourself a Scouser?’, and the map on the right shows the average response value when asked how Scouse they feel on a scale of 1 to 7.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Map showing strength of Scouse identity

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Unsurprisingly, Liverpool has the highest level of Scouse identification, followed by Knowsley to its east. Sefton to the north has the third highest level of Scouseness at 53%, but this hides geographic variation—the south of the borough is more strongly Scouse compared to the top half, which includes the town of Southport (where some locals agitate for the town to leave Merseyside and rejoin the county of Lancashire).

Wirral is the fourth most Scouse area, again with geographic variation: the east of the peninsular is more Scouse than the west, and this also reflects the Labour-Conservative divide seen in the council chamber. St Helens is the least Scouse council area, and this reflects a broadly low level of Scouseness across the borough as a whole.

Across Merseyside, 57% of respondents identify as Scouse, which is higher than the proportion of people in Cornwall who identify as Cornish (15.6%) or of people in England who identified as English (29.6%), but lower than the level of Welsh identification in Wales (63%) and Scottish identification in Scotland (82.7%) (Census 2021 2022; Scotland’s Census 2021).

Merseyside’s voting behaviour is so different to the rest of Northern England in its anti-Conservatism that in Kanagasooriam and Simon’s 2021 study of the red wall they decided to include a dummy variable for one area only: Merseyside (Kanagasooriam and Simon 2021, Table 1). Electorally, Merseyside is a heavily Labour-voting area. Across Merseyside’s 15 constituencies, Labour won 65% of the vote in the 2019 general election, to the Conservative Party’s 20% and the Liberal Democrat’s 6% (in 1983 the figures were 40%, 35% and 24%, respectively) (figures calculated from Uberoi et al. 2020). The picture is not much different on the local level. As shown in Fig. 2, following the 2023 local elections Labour hold a majority of seats in all Merseyside councils except the Wirral, where they are just short of a majority. The Liberal Democrats have a presence on all councils, but the Conservatives are absent from Liverpool and Knowsley (tellingly, the areas with the highest proportion of people who identify as Scouse).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Share of councillors by party in Merseyside councils (May 2023) and EU referendum vote by council area

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One final element that makes Merseyside’s politics unique is that The Sun newspaper—one of the most popular, and Eurosceptic, tabloid newspapers in England—faces a boycott. This was a result of the newspaper’s coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, a fatal human crush which took place during a football match between Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield on 15 April 1989. The Sun made a series of false allegations—some of which were under the front-page headline “THE TRUTH”—about the behaviour of Liverpool FC fans. The boycott was started by Liverpool FC fans and was joined by supporters of Everton FC, the city’s other football team. The boycott has spread across Merseyside—Foos and Bischof (2022) report that 86% of newsagents in Liverpool and 62% of newsagents in Merseyside refused to sell The Sun, compared to 10% and 12% of newsagents in neighbouring Lancashire and Cheshire respectively.

As a result of this boycott, readers in Merseyside moved from The Sun to the pro-EU Daily Mirror (although the Mirror did not focus on the EU anywhere near as much as The Sun did). Using a difference-in-difference design, Foos and Bischof (2022) find that, relative to other Northern England constituencies, constituencies in Merseyside went from being more Eurosceptic than the north of England as a whole before the Hillsborough disaster and subsequent boycott of The Sun, to being generally less Eurosceptic than the north of England as a whole.

When it came to the EU referendum, Merseyside was split (as shown in Fig. 2). Across the county 52% of voters chose to remain and 48% to leave, but this was skewed by Liverpool’s heavy pro-remain position (58%) and the fact the council area makes up around 30% of those who voted in Merseyside. Knowsley and St Helens—the two least populous boroughs—both saw a majority for leave (figures calculated from Uberoi 2016). This is interesting, because, as is shown in Fig. 1, Knowsley is the Scousest borough after Liverpool whereas St Helens is the least Scouse.

Given the above, it is worth exploring the political salience of the Scouse identity today. As noted by Holbolt et al., “there are three key components of affective polarization along opinion-based lines—in-group identification, group differentiation (especially prejudice against members of the out-group), and evaluative bias in both perceptions and decision making” (Hobolt et al. 2020). There is clearly a sense of Scouse in-group identification across Merseyside, as is shown by the high levels of Scouse identification in Fig. 1. Additionally, there are clear potential out-groups: the Conservative Party and The Sun both fulfil this role, as does London and ‘the south’ in a more nebulous way. The Scouse identity is also contrasted against the English national identity, and a general sense of anti-English sentiment is widely reported as fact among the city’s cultural elites and sporting commentators, and for which the evidence tends to rest upon the booing of the national anthem and ‘Scouse not English’ banners at Liverpool FC matches, alongside personal anecdotes and histories (Jeffery 2022b). These points are brought together in an article in the Liverpool Echo immediately after the 2019 general election. The headline was “‘Scouse not English’ goes viral as Merseyside remains defiant after the election”, as “Using the viral hashtag #scousenotenglish, scores of Twitter users spoke of how proud they are to be from Liverpool following the Labour victory in the city” (Hadfield 2019).

Research questions

This article explores four key questions, based on the literature outlined above. As noted, national identities are often related to increased support for, or opposition to, certain parties and EU referendum position. This, coupled with the long-standing association of Liverpool with both Labour voting and pro-EU sentiment, leads to the first two research questions:

  1. 1.

    How does Scouse identity relate to party choice?

  2. 2.

    How does Scouse identity relate to EU referendum choice?

As outlined above, the British national identity means different things in the different parts of the United Kingdom—that is to say its political profile is geographically contingent (Henderson et al. 2021; Keating and McEwen 2020). This leads to our third research question:

  1. 3.

    How does Scouse identity, and the political salience thereof, vary between Liverpool and the rest of Merseyside?

Finally, as noted by Henderson (2021), these territorial identities do not exist in a bubble—they co-exist alongside other competing national identities. It is therefore reasonable to explore the extent to which local identities might interact with national identities. This leads to a fourth research question:

  1. 4.

    How does Scouse identity interact with national identities?

Data and methodology

This study makes use of two datasets: the British Election Study and a survey of voters from across Merseyside, commissioned by the author and conducted by Panelbase. The survey has a representative sample of 616 electors from across Merseyside, but following the removal of missing values the final sample size is 562 for the vote choice models, and once ‘don’t knows’ are removed, 468 for the EU membership question.

The questions used in the survey were taken from the British Election Study to allow for direct comparison between the two datasets. The one exception was vote choice, where respondents in the Merseyside survey were asked to rank parties. A respondent’s vote choice was produced by taking their highest-ranked party.

This study draws on waves 15 (March 2019) to 21 (May 2021) of the British Election Study, and for all variables each individual’s most recent response was used. This was done to maximise the response rate across all variables in the study. There were some minor issues of question wording for views on the European Union, where waves 15 to 19 asked respondents whether they would stay or remain, whilst waves 20 and 21 asked if they would rejoin the EU or stay out. This does not appear to have had any significant impact on results. Between waves 18 and 19, 98% of respondents were consistent in their leave/remain position and between waves 19 and 20, when the question changed, 98% of wave 19 leave voters said they would stay out, while 95% of wave 19 remain voters said they would rejoin, so these preferences are very stable. The full figures are shown in Table 3 in Appendix.

The control variables for this study are gender, age (as an ordered factor, from ‘ < 25’, ‘25–34’, ‘35–44’, ‘45–54’, ‘55–64’, and ‘65 + ’), socio-economic group (ABC1 or C2DE), income (as an ordered factor, ‘Under £8,500’, ‘£8,500—£13,499’, ‘£13,500—£23,999’, ‘£24,000—£33,999’, ‘£34,000—£49,999’, ‘£50,000—£70,000’, and ‘Over £70,000’) and ethnicity (a binary ‘White British’/‘Non-White British’ measure due to very small sample sizes in the Merseyside dataset).Footnote 4

Other variables used include the British Election Study’s left–right, authoritarian-libertarian, and populism scales (with higher values representing more left-wing, authoritarian, and populist views), as well as an equality scale based on respondents’ views on whether attempts at equality for women, gays, and ethnic minorities has gone too far, and an immigration scale based on whether immigration is positive along cultural and economic dimensions.Footnote 5 These have been chosen because they could reasonably be assumed to be predictive of support or opposition to certain parties or EU membership. The full set of questions is presented in Appendix.

Scouse identity was measured in two ways. First, respondents were asked to rank how strongly Scouse they feel on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 7 (very strongly), mirroring the approach used in the British Election Study. Second, respondents were asked whether they would consider themselves a Scouser or not (a binary yes/no question).

To answer the research questions, a series of logistic regression models with exponentiated coefficients are presented, with party choice as a binary variable for Labour, Conservatives, Green, Liberal Democrats, Reform and UKIP, as well as a binary variable for whether a respondent would rejoin the European Union.

Results and analysis

The results of the first set of logistic regression analyses are shown in Table 1. In answer to the question of how Scouse identity relates to party choice, respondents in Merseyside who identify as a Scouser are more likely to support the Labour Party and less likely to support the Conservative Party and, interestingly, the Green Party, compared to those who do not identify as a Scouser. Scouse identifiers are no more likely to want to rejoin the EU than non-Scouse identifiers across Merseyside, nor are they less likely to support UKIP or Reform.

Table 1 Logistic regression models for vote choice in Merseyside (with exponentiated coefficients)
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We can go beyond statistical significance and analyse the relative importance of the Scouse identity variable in the regression models compared to the other variables. The relative importance is measured by the absolute value of the t-statistic for each model parameter. This is presented in Fig. 3 and the relative importance rank of the Scouse variable shown as the black line. The full table can be found in Table 4 in Appendix.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Chart showing the relative importance of the Scouse identity variable

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Figure 3 clearly shows that the Scouse identity variable is the most important in determining support for the Labour, Conservative and Green parties, and despite not being statistically significant in the regression model, the second-most important variable in the Liberal Democrat model (after views on equality). Interestingly, for Reform, UKIP, and rejoining the EU—all variables with a strong European aspect to them—the Scouse identity is less important, ranking sixth for the two populist radical right parties and seventh for determining support for rejoining the European Union.

There is also evidence that the Scouse identity is associated with party-political norms which are generally not held by those within Merseyside who are not Scousers. Figure 4 shows responses to three statements: ‘Real Scousers should vote Labour’, ‘Real Scousers should not vote Conservative’, and ‘Real Scousers should not buy the Sun newspaper’.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Response to survey question by Scouse identity

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Scousers are slightly more anti-Tory than they are pro-Labour: 64% of Scouse identifiers either agree or agree strongly that ‘real’ Scousers should not vote Tory, compared to around 57% for those who agree or strongly agree that ‘real’ Scousers should vote Labour. For non-Scousers the values are 33% and 26% respectively. To put this into comparison, the strongest norm associated with the Scouse identity is whether ‘real’ Scousers should buy the Sun newspaper, for the reasons outlined above. 88% of Scouse identifiers agree or strongly agree that ‘real’ Scousers should not buy the newspaper, compared to 56% of non-Scouse identifiers. Taken together, this is clear evidence that the Scouse identity contains politically-salient norms, and also that the Scouse identity structures voting behaviour.

Geographic variation of Scouse identity

In order to address the third research question we must explore whether the political consequences of the Scouse identity play out differently in Liverpool to the rest of Merseyside. To do this we add an interaction effect to the previous models controlling for whether a respondent lives in Liverpool or not. This is shown in Table 2.

Table 2 Logistic regression models for vote choice in Merseyside with interaction effects (and exponentiated coefficients)
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Firstly, the interaction effect shows us that the positive impact of identifying as a Scouser on supporting Labour is stronger in Liverpool than it is across the rest of Merseyside, whereas for the Greens the negative relationship with the Scouse identity is stronger in Liverpool than elsewhere. This could be because the Greens are more often the main rival to Labour in Liverpool than is the case elsewhere in Merseyside, and thus a Green vote is effectively an anti-Labour vote. These findings suggest that the strength of the Scouse identity’s political salience does vary based on geography.

On the other hand, the interaction effect was not statistically significant for the Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Reform, UKIP or rejoin models. Both identifying as a Scouser and living in Liverpool were negatively associated with Conservative voting, which suggests that anti-Conservative voting behaviour is both identity- and place-based. Interestingly, living in Liverpool is positively associated with support for Reform (at the 10% level), which could suggest right-wing or Eurosceptic voters in the city looking for an alternative to the Conservatives with less of a social stigma, whereas in the rest of Merseyside these voters would just vote Tory. After all, there is a large minority of Eurosceptic voters in the city—in Liverpool’s 2014 local elections UKIP came third with 9,612 votes (9.7%), despite standing 10 fewer candidates than the Greens who came second with 10,581 votes (10.7%) (Teale 2023).

The Liberal Democrats do better among those who identify as a Scouser across Merseyside as a whole, whereas support for rejoining the EU is higher within Liverpool than elsewhere in Merseyside (both of these relationships are significant at the 10% level), and is not connected to the Scouse identity. This latter finding aligns with the aforementioned research by Foos and Bischof (2022): as the boycott of The Sun is geographically-based and stronger in Liverpool than the rest of Merseyside, so we would expect to see the consequences of the boycott play out more strongly in Liverpool than in the rest of Merseyside.

As such, there is a geographic element to the political salience of the Scouse identity: for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, Scouse identity is politically salient when it comes to the likelihood of supporting either party across Merseyside as a whole, whereas the political salience of the Scouse identity vis-a-vis Labour and the Greens is stronger in Liverpool than elsewhere. For Reform, and rejoining the EU, place is important whereas identity is not.

Thus there is sufficient evidence here to support the claim that Scouse identity does play a role in shaping political preferences, especially with regard to support for Labour, the Conservative Party and the Green Party.

Scouse identity and national identities

The final element of this analysis explores the extent to which Scouse identity interacts with national identities—in this case Englishness and Britishness. This takes work by Henderson et al. (2021) as a guide, and utilises their relative territorial identity (RTI) measure to analyse complex multilevel local and national identities.

RTI aims “to capture the priority given to sub-state or state-level identity” (Henderson 2021). To generate the measure, respondents are asked to place themselves on a scale of 1 to 7 based on how strongly they identify with a given identity, with 7 being the strongest and 1 the weakest. The respondent’s Britishness score is then subtracted from their sub-state identity score to produce a 13-point measure of relative identity, which is then rescaled to between −1 and +1. A value of −1 means a respondent is completely British, with no sub-state identity, whereas +1 means the respondent has no British identity and only a sub-state identity. 0 means that a respondent holds their British and sub-state identity in equal measure. For the English-Scouse measure, the English identity is subtracted from the Scouse identity, meaning −1 is exclusively English and +1 is exclusively Scouse.

Figure 5 shows the distribution of the RTI measure across each identity of interest. Starting with the RTI for English-Scouse, there is very little evidence to support the ‘Scouse not English’ trope often deployed across Merseyside. In fact, more people—28% of respondents—feel just as Scouse as they do English, and more people in Merseyside feel exclusively English-not-Scouse (11%) than exclusively Scouse-not-English (1%). The same is true for the British-Scouse RTI, and interestingly, if you separate out respondents in Liverpool, a plurality of respondents are equally Scouse and English or British (36% and 35%, respectively), rather than exclusively one or the other. The vast majority of respondents feel some attachment to Englishness/Britishness alongside their Scouse identity. Further, a lower share of respondents feel exclusively Scouse compared to those who feel exclusively Scottish (12%), or even exclusively Welsh (4%). As such, it is immediately clear that the Scouse identity does co-exist with the English and British national identities.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Distribution of the relative territorial identity (RTI) variable

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The final step in this analysis is to explore the impact of RTI on voting behaviour, again using a series of logistic regression models with party choice as a dummy variable. The full tables for each model are presented in the Appendix (see Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11), but Fig. 6 shows the predicted probability of voting for a given party at each level of RTI. Relationships which are statistically significant are denoted by a solid line.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Relationship between RTI and support for rejoin/political parties (non-converging models have been removed)

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In terms of rejoining the European Union, the more someone identifies as Scouse relative to English or British, the greater the likelihood of wanting to rejoin the EU. Like Henderson et al. (2021), this study finds  a positive relationship between British-Scottish RTI and pro-EU sentiment and a negative relationship between British-English RTI and pro-EU sentiment. However, unlike in Henderson et al.’s study, this analysis finds no statistically significant relationship between British-Welsh RTI and views on EU membership.

When it comes to party-political behaviour there is evidence that the more Scouse a respondent is, relative to both English and British identity, the more likely they are to vote for the Labour Party. The only other statistically significant relationship is for the British-Scottish RTI, which is negative. This is unsurprising, given that holding an exclusively Scottish identity correlates with supporting both Scottish independence and the Scottish Nationalist Party.

For supporting the Conservative Party, the more one identifies as Scouse, relative to British or English, and Welsh or Scottish relative to British, the less likely one is to vote Conservative, whereas the reverse is true for English. Again, this is unsurprising and is in line with the findings above and in the broader literature on sub-state identities.

The only other relationships of note for the two Scouse RTIs are for the Green Party, whereby the more Scouse one is, relative to English or British, the less likely one is to support the Green Party. Interestingly, the reverse is true for British-English RTI, where the more English one feels the greater the likelihood of supporting the Green Party.

For the Liberal Democrats there is no statistically significant relationship for either of the Scouse RTIs, but it is interesting to see that the more Welsh, Scottish, or English a voter feels, relative to British, the less likely they are to support the party. There is a negative relationship between British-Welsh RTI and UKIP support, and a positive relationship between British-English RTI and UKIP support. There is no relationship between any of the RTIs and support for Reform.

One final point that emerges from the tables is the role of populist values. Whereas in all the RTI models every statistically significant variable acts in the expected direction, populism is an outlier. For the Welsh, Scottish, and English models populism acts in the expected direction, but for Labour and Conservative voting in the Scouse RTIs, it does not: an increase in populist values increases the likelihood of voting Labour (and Reform, as expected) and decreases the likelihood of voting Conservative—the opposite direction than that found nationally. This was also the case in the logistic models presented in Tables 1 and 2.

There is something about the political context of Merseyside whereby populism does not operate in the same way to how it operates elsewhere in the country. First, there does not seem to be a strong mediation effect taking place. Mediation analysis using the R package mediate, and including demographic controls, suggests that Scouse identity is not being mediated by populism, nor vice versa. Populism accounts for just 8% of the impact of Scouse identity on voting Labour and 10% for voting Conservative, whilst Scouse identity accounts for 16% of the effect of populism on voting Labour and 18% for voting Conservative.

One reason why this might be the case is that the population of Merseyside has a higher level of baseline populism compared to the rest of Great Britain (in the British Election Study data the average score is 2.59 in Merseyside compared to 2.45 in the rest of Great Britain). Even after running the regression model presented in Table 1 without the Scouse ID variable populism is still positively correlated with Labour voting and negatively so with Conservative voting. This aligns with the argument laid out by Jeffery (2023), that the Scouse identity became politicised during the Militant-led conflict with the Thatcher government in the 1980s, which in addition to imbuing an anti-Conservative edge to the Scouse identity also embedded a layer of anti-establishment populism. This anti-establishment streak was compounded by the Hillsborough disaster which further, justifiably, imparted a deep distrust of authority in the city. The consequences of the Hillsborough disaster went far beyond party politics and it cannot be overstated the extent to which this shaped—and continues to shape—how the city sees itself and its place in the political system.

As such, populism acts in the reverse direction than expected for Labour and Conservative voting behaviour because of a) the higher base levels of populism in Merseyside, and b) the anti-Conservative sentiment associated with the Scouse identity. This is further supported by the fact that populism operates in the expected direction for supporting Reform, a party which has no association, positively or negatively, with the Scouse identity or the city’s experiences in the 1980s.

Conclusions

This study had three broad aims. The first was to show that local identities can matter just as much as national identities. The second was to begin to understand the political consequences of the Scouse identity. The third was to place the Scouse identity in a comparative context alongside sub-state national identities.

Firstly, it is evident that local identities matter. As Fig. 3 and Table 4 show, Scouse identity is one of the key variables in predicting Labour, Conservative, and Green support. Secondly, the political consequences of holding a Scouse identity are not uniform across Merseyside: while a Scouse identity is related to a lower likelihood of voting Conservative and a higher level of voting Liberal Democrat across the county of Merseyside, the impact of holding a Scouse identity is greater in determining support for the Labour and Green party in Liverpool than it is in the rest of Merseyside.

The political salience of local identities also varies across parties in other ways. When it comes to support for the European Union, in line with other studies, English identity is found to be associated with Euroscepticism while Scottish identity is associated with pro-European sentiment. The Scouse identity is associated with a more pro-European position relative to the English identity, but no statistically significant difference exists between Britishness and Scouseness.

This study has also highlighted the relationship between identities, place and values, namely how voters in Merseyside are more populist than England as a whole. This populist backdrop has clear historical causes, with the Scouse identity becoming politicised at a time when Liverpool was first in conflict with the Thatcher government over local government funding, and then the city’s quest for justice over the Hillsborough disaster, which involved The Sun newspaper (and broader media landscape), the policing establishment, and central government. This also goes some way to explaining why a Labour vote is correlated with increased levels of populism and a Conservative vote is associated with lower levels of populism, the opposite of what is seen across the rest of England.

This analysis raises further questions in the study of British politics. Firstly, which local identities are politically salient? Second, why are some local identities politically salient whilst others are not? And thirdly, how do these local identities interact with other identities? Hopefully, this study of the Scouse identity is only the beginning of the study of the political salience of local identities.