This is the third and last book (at least for now) of a series of studies on British elections authored by the principal investigators of the much-admired British Election Study (BES). In many respects, it builds on its predecessors, Political Choice in Britain (2004) and Performance Politics and the British Voter (2009). In these studies of the 2001 and 2005 elections, respectively, Harold Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne Stewart, and Paul Whiteley consistently argued that valence factors go the furthest in explaining voter decisions in Britain. Unlike more traditional sociological accounts of British elections, which associated political choice with class and demographic factors, or Downsian emphases on parties’ policy offerings, the valence politics model maintains that the most important determinants of voter choice are the nonpositional, nonideological attributes that voters assign to candidates and political parties. These include attributes like leader images, party performance evaluations, and flexible partisan attachments. In attaching an argument to the analyses of data, Political Choice and Performance Politics were more than “election studies” typically construed; rather, these studies contributed to a growing literature in electoral behavior and party politics on the waning effects of social cleavages and growing importance of valence attributes in shaping election outcomes.
The valence politics model is once again prominently featured in this third installment, albeit augmented slightly with a focus on political sophistication and heuristics. Apart from a modest shift in theoretical focus, Affluence, Austerity, and Electoral Change in Britain is set apart from its predecessors in some notable ways. Chief among them is the sheer amount of individual-level data the authors bring to bear.The book draws on different components of the 2010 BES. This includes remove its Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS), a monthly cross-sectional survey that draws on YouGov’s online panel. With this resource, the authors are able to examine the effects of critical events on political attitudes not only at discrete points in time (as in a three-wave panel) but “in real time” as they occur. This innovation of moving from static cross-sectional analyses to dynamic assessments proves especially fortuitous, given the economic—and political—volatility brought to the fore by the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007 and the fall of Lehman Brothers one year later. With the CMS data, the authors are able to demonstrate how the financial crisis and ensuing recession shaped a wide range of attitudes. These include not only party vote intentions (which have been tracked at high-frequency intervals in the UK for decades) but attitudes thought to drive the vote itself, such as party leader images, expectations about the future of the financial crisis, and even life satisfaction.
These data make possible several novel analyses. For instance, in Chapter 5 Whiteley and his colleagues perform cross-level analyses of the joint effects of their valence factors (leader images, partisan attachments, and economic perceptions) on party choice and show how these factors vary over time and according to fluctuations in macroeconomic mood. Error correction models of the effects of bank failures and bailouts tell us about the memory of these crisis events on political support and of views on party economic management. And in what I believe to a be a first in an election study book, the authors perform a vector autoregression analysis on data from 2004 to 2012 to show that objective economic indicators not only cause but are indirectly caused by subjective economic perceptions. By moving from cross-sectional analyses to modeling the dynamics of public opinion, this study will likely prove to be a pioneer in the evolution of national election studies.
The capacity to draw on high-frequency survey data gives the authors license to be more eclectic in the topics they examine. Election study books are typically organized to explore the voter’s decision in the election, with chapters ranging from campaign involvement, the decision to participate, and the competing determinants driving party choice. Affluence takes care of these obligatory tasks, but they are relegated to two chapters, 4 and 5. Preceding these “core” chapters are chapters on political choices from 1997 through Gordon Brown’s time at Number 10 Downing Street. Chapter 2 offers a fast overview of the 1997, 2001, and 2005 elections, where the authors recount their earlier claims linking the success of Tony Blair’s New Labour to the party’s capacity to oversee prosperous times, rather than to social/demographic factors or to specific policy positions taken. Chapter 3 provides an account of the Brown years. In the absence of an election, the authors deftly employ panel and aggregate time-series analysis, from a variety of sources, to model the dynamics of Labour Party choice, party support, and economic management competence. The big picture here is that despite differences in their ideologies, the factors that brought down Brown were similar to those that kept Blair in the public’s favor for those many years.
Chapter 6 turns to look at the first years of the Conservative—Liberal Democrat coalition government, showing that subjective economic factors played a crucial intermediating role between economic shocks and mass attitudes. Chapter 7 parts ways with the dynamics of support for parties and leaders and examines public sentiment toward the May 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote. Whiteley and colleagues show that support for the new voting rules—which were soundly rejected—were strongly shaped by individuals’ images of party leaders David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband, with party attachments having only weak effects. The final two chapters diverge most abruptly from the “tried and true” election study tome: Chapter 8 presents an analysis of subjective well-being, and Chapter 9 places Britain in comparative perspective by reporting cross-national analyses of satisfaction with government and with democracy in 21 European countries.
The wide-ranging nature of Affluence, Austerity, and Electoral Change in Britain means that readers coming from different subfields in political science and sociology will find something of interest. This book is not just for students of British electoral behavior. Its great strength—apart from the richness of the data it brings to bear—is the range of topics in public opinion and electoral behavior on which it has new insights to offer. However, some readers may find that this impressive breadth leaves little room for more in-depth coverage of the voter’s calculus with respect to the 2010 election itself. Compared to recent elections, the 2010 vote was unique, both in terms of the context of financial market crisis and the presence of a credible third choice in Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democratic Party. Regarding the former, it would have been interesting to see whether the effects of the crisis on opinions and choices varied on the basis of the individual’s relationship to the economy. For example, did the crisis in financial markets mean that property owners were less supportive of Labour than they otherwise would have been? Or, conversely, did the economic downturn mean that Labour’s traditional supporters had become increasingly jaded with their party’s moderate stance on fiscal policy and punished Miliband accordingly? Regarding the Liberal Democrat effect, I would have liked to learn more about how this credible third option augured or weakened the attraction of the valence politics model. What are the expectations, regarding the relative importance of valence and position effects, when the contest for government leadership shifts from two competitors to three?
Before closing, I have two other reactions. The first is the observation that Chapter 8 on subjective well-being sits rather uncomfortably with the rest of the book. Before reading this chapter, I expected it to compare the effects of valence and positional factors on an individual’s sense of well-being. This approach would have grounded the chapter theoretically in the valence politics oeuvre. Instead, however, the focus is on how sociotropic and egotropic political factors contribute to life satisfaction, above and beyond the influence of nonpolitical determinants.
A final comment is a request to tell us more about the staying power of the valence politics model. The authors argue that the shift from New Labour to Cameron and his austerity did not push voters to evaluate politicians more by position than by valence. But what about the big over-time picture? Affluence marshals data on British political behavior from 1997 to 2012. Is the importance of factors like economic management competence, leader images, and party attachments constant across these 15 years? Or is it the case, as some have argued, that valence has increasingly supplanted positional, or ideological, factors over time? And if this is the case, then how are we to make sense of recent developments in British party politics? In Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party members appear to have chosen “position” over “performance.” And while the Tories are in the driver’s seat, intraparty divides on Europe and other issues stand to grow in the near future.
These considerations aside, there is much in Affluence to admire. There is something here for students of electoral behavior, those interested in electoral system reform, and researchers looking into the political effects of economic crisis. More than perhaps any other election studies team, Whiteley and his coauthors have raised the bar, both in terms of their theoretical approach and in terms of the empirical evidence they bring to the table.
