This week we're looking at the UK general election of 2024. How did its remarkable result come about? What does this tell us about underlying forces in British politics and what lessons might we take away for the future?
The 2024 UK General Election was nothing short of exceptional. Labour achieved one of the largest majorities in the history of the House of Commons — yet on the lowest vote share ever recorded for a winning party. Meanwhile, the Conservatives suffered their most devastating defeat in modern political history.
In this episode, we unpack the seismic shifts that led to this remarkable result. Why did the vote fragment across so many parties? What drove the electorate’s choices in this cycle? And what happened to the underlying dynamics of voting behavior?
To explore these questions, we turn to a special issue of The Political Quarterly, our partner journal, which dives into the election’s implications and causes in depth.
Joining us are three distinguished contributors to that issue:
Together, they provide expert insights into both the immediate drivers of the 2024 result and the longer-term transformations reshaping UK politics.
Mentioned in this episode:
Alan: [00:00:00] Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at the UK General Election of 2024. How did its remarkable result come about? What does this tell us about underlying forces in British politics, and what lessons might we take away for the future?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. The 2024 UK General Election was exceptional. Labour secured one of the largest majorities in the House of Commons ever, but on the lowest vote share for any winning party.
The Conservatives suffered their worst defeat in modern times. Votes were more fragmented across political parties than ever before. How could such an outcome come about? What were the immediate drivers of this result, and [00:01:00] what happened to the underlying dynamics of voting behaviour?
While a recent special issue of our partner journal, The Political Quarterly explores these three questions and many more in the latest of our special series of episodes focusing on new research published in The Political Quarterly. I'm delighted to be joined by astellar panel of three contributors to that special issue.
Jane Green is Professor of Political Science and British Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and co-director of the British Election Study. Marta Miori is a doctoral student in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester, anda Research Officer at Nuffield College, Oxford.Paula Surridge is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. Jane, Marta, and Paula welcome all to UCL Uncovering Politics.
Marta, do you want to get us going?
Marta: Thank you. There's many noteworthy [00:02:00] things about the outcome of the 2024 election.
The key thing to understandis that voters were unhappy with incumbents across the UK nations in an exceptional manner. So, the Tories in England, the SNP and Scotland, and to some degree Labour in Wales, voters were very unhappy with their incumbents, blamed their incumbents for how bad things were doing, and they punished their incumbents in each of the nations.
And I think it's the key theme to then understand mentation, tactical voting, on different levels.
Alan: Thank you. Jane, what would you highlight?
Jane:As Marta expressed, think about it in a long-term context too. Paula identified the trend towards fragmentation over time.
Now, the thing with that trend is that it's going to have different characteristics in different elections. People have been rejecting the two largest parties over time. Look at 2017 and 2019 as exceptions to that trend, but 2024 as then returning to that trend, [00:03:00] but with its varying features as Marta outlined.
So strong anti-incumbent voting, then translating into a very strong seat-based outcome for the Labour Party. Exceptional disproportionality, so that trend has different expressions. The context then was the all-important thing to understand, just how that fragmentation then materialized and gave Labour its majority.
Alan: Thank you. Paula?
Paula: I'd agree absolutely with everything that Marta and Jane said. But I'd add two extra things that I think we need to keep an eye on coming out of this election, moving forward rather than backward into the context.
And that is, first of all, the vote share for the two main parties was historically low. The combined vote share for the three main parties, if you stick the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors in there, is also historically low. So there was a real willingness to go outside the mainstream of what had been the mainstream [00:04:00] of British politics and look at other parties.
That fragmentation went even further, perhaps than it has done before, into the independents, some of the minor parties, the Greens and Reform.
Alan:You had a stat in your article saying those parties and the independents collectively got over 30% of the vote. Is that right?
Paula: Yeah.
Alan:Extraordinary. A third or nearly a third of the vote.
Paula: Yeah. The other thing, which none of us will talk very much about, but it would be remiss not to have it mentioned somewhere on the podcast, is turnout at the election. The fact that turnout was very low.
It's not something we've been able to analyse. Or even really begin to analyse yet. But I think it would be a shame not to at least have mentioned it at some point.
Alan:Turnout was exactly 60%, just fractionally above the lowest ever in 2001. Jane?
Jane:Two things, disillusionment and foregone conclusion. So that combination of disillusionment pushing people away from the mainstream and pushing people away from the government in the UK, but also the [00:05:00] SNP in Scotland. But that sense, too, that the election was a foregone conclusion. So, you were thinking tactically who to vote for. You're thinking why was the Liberal Democrat vote share low, but their seat bonus so big? Same for Labour. It's about understanding how people perceive race.
Alan: Good. That gives us a starting point. Let'sgo deeper into your article, Jane and Marta. That article focuses on some of those key themes that we've just been talking about, around how it was that Labour was able to win such a resounding victory based on such a low share of the vote.
Jane, what's the basic answer to that question?
Jane:Clearly, if you are getting 411 MPs on 34% of the vote, the first thing we seeis how efficient Labour's vote was. So that means that they're not wasting votes where they don't matter, where they're not decisive in winning MPs. In fact, their vote went down in many of their safest seats.
That helps to [00:06:00] make it possible that they can have a more efficient vote. And their vote went up a little bit, or even they won sub-seats from the Conservatives where their vote share went down. So that level of efficiency was critical.
We identify three things. The first is that crucial split on the right. That's the most significant thing that's happening in British politics now, the biggest change combined with that disproportionality and that fragmentation. It's the Conservative vote collapsing to the right, primarily, that helps us understand why (in a first pass the post system) that threshold was so much lower for Labour to be able to just across that threshold.
And the other massive factor is tactical voting. Our analysis showed that it was much stronger on the left between progressive parties. That's partly to do with the anti-incumbent votes, so you don't see voters on the right behaving the same way to protect the Conservatives in many constituencies.
And then lastly, Labour's swing was greater in [00:07:00] Scotland and that was significant for that disproportionality story and for the seat gains they made on their vote share. But we can understand that through voters rejecting two governments, the SNP in Scotland and the Conservatives in Westminster, and in Scotland, that that double incumbency problem was exceptional.
Alan:It sounds like all those various factors are related to this anti-incumbency point that you highlighted right at the start.
So, you've got that double anti-incumbency in Scotland. I'm interested you linked the strength of tactical voting between left and right to that anti-incumbency factor,there wasn't tactical voting on the right. You're suggesting not because there's some kind of incompatibility between Conservatives and Reform, but because of this election, the Conservatives were somewhat toxic, I guess, being the incumbents, and therefore, Reform supporters were not going there.
Jane: When you think about tactical voting, you must believe that your party isn't going to win and therefore vote for another party [00:08:00] that's best placed to defeat a party you're not favourable towards.
So, we alsomust factor in people's perceptions of the race, whether people correctly perceive the local race. This is one of the reasons the Liberal Democrats could do so well in terms of seats but not in votes. That disproportionality, the seat gain compared to the vote gain, was also very exceptional for the Lib Dems. Whenyou look at in vote shares you can see that it wasn't necessarily a vote for the mainstream parties, but seat shares it really was. And that’s because people understood the local race so much better. They knew the Liberal Democrats were better placed to defeat the Tories than other parties, and therefore, the Liberal Democrats got their votes.
So very consistent with that anti-incumbency context. Also consistent with (not everybody identifying the local tactical context correctly, of course) but many doing so, and then being mobilized in order to defeat to Conservatives in the main.
Alan: Marta, you've looked at patterns of tactical voting, particularly among parties on the left. What do we see?
Marta:We used British Election Study [00:09:00] data where people could say how much they liked different parties, rank them on a scale, and we looked at people who preferred another party, but didn't vote for their preferred party because a party that they liked less was more likely to win in their constituency.
We see this happening a lot between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. I think the result is very few Labour/Lib Dem seats, because there's no seat where that electorate was split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. People either rallied behind Labour or the Liberal Democrats, right?
But when it came to the right, you have a lot of people who prefer Reform but think that the conservatives are the best place to beat Labour or the Greens or the Lib Dems in their seat, are still going to vote Reform. And similarly, people who liked the Conservatives but [00:10:00] thought it was a Reform/Labour race. They still voted Conservative. This split on the right allowed Labour to take many seats with low vote shares.
Now the vote is split between three parties, two parties on the right and one party on the left. You have almost equal shares for the Reform Party, the Conservatives, and Labour, which really shows how much of Labour's current coalition of votes is reliant on this split?
Alan:Do we know what the result would've been had Reform not been a major factor in this election? Nigel Farage nearly didn't throw his hat into the ring, and therefore, quite plausibly, Reform would've been a rather lesser force within the election. So I guess one scenario that we could consider is what Reform would have been and what the results would have been had that decision not taken place? And I guess we can potentially go even further and consider ‘what if Reform was the same as the Brexit party in 2019’? And what would the outcome have been in that [00:11:00] scenario?
Can we say anything about that at all? Or is that just a slightly silly question?
Marta: I think it's a great question.We were analysing this before Farage became the leader; this didn't happen overnight. Conservatives are losing voters to other parties and for the whole electoral cycle, right? These voters didn't know where they were going to go. They were unhappy with the Conservatives. We know that a lot of the time these voters then go back to their main party, but the Reform option was already an option, and it was already growing before Farage. Personally I think these voters were very unhappy, and maybe they wouldn't have voted at all.
Jane:That's a very difficult question, Alan, because you're saying ‘let's isolate this one factor from all these other factors and work out what the result would've been’. I'm sure people are working on that. When the Brexit party stood down strategically and stood only in seatsthe Labour Party was defending - there's a calculation of the impact of that. I'm just gonna say I think it was really important, right? So when we're talking about scale, when we look now at where that split on the right is now a threat to the Conservative party or a threat to the Labour Party, you're looking at hundreds of seats. It's not just what happened in the election in terms of the election outcome; it's what we're then left with. What do the constituencies look like now? So the impact last year would've been significant, and the number of seats, because British politics and the British electorate have aligned into two blocks.
On the right, on the more socially Conservative side, you've got Conservatives and Reform. Reform was the choice for Conservatives who supported leave because the Conservative coalition changed after the elections. The impact could be big, and I can’t put a number on it. But it's big now too because now you've got this knife-edge competition between three or four parties and so many places that a further split on the right can help the Reform, that can do damage to Labour now, as well as help Labour.
It helped labour in many places in [00:13:00] 2024. Marta and I have shown in our Political Quarterly paper just how much that split on the right helpedthe Labour party, but that doesn't necessarily follow looking ahead. It's a very big, significant impact. It's precisely because Conservatives really had mostly Reform or don't know, or abstain, as their core options, because of the way the Conservative coalition had changed over time.
Alan: We've talked about what the Conservatives did, what Reform did, tactical voting patterns… how much of Labour's victory was due to Labour? To what extent did labour make any kind of difference to the results? I'm guessing, for example, that the fact that Labour re-positioned itself compared to the Corbyn era in the 2017 and 2019 elections made some difference. What can we say about Labour's role in this election victory?
Jane:The big questionis agency, isn't it? Are we talking about context defining everything? How much agency did each of the parties have in the outcome? Certainly you [00:14:00] can't say there isn't any agency. Those tactical decisions of where to place resources, where to campaign. The Labour Party looked at those seats it didn't need to worry about and diverted resources away from them. That always happens. There’d be a load of these games.
I think the way to think about that is how did people see Labour as an option, and was the ideological image of Labour a factor, being seen as marginally better than the Conservatives. We're still talking about major disillusionment and disaffection and not a great deal of trust in Labour. Same with the Tories, they had their strategy, same with Reform, and so on. This was a lucky leader of the Labour Party going into an election with a set of factors not of his own making, in my opinion. I didn't know if Marta, Paula agreed.
Alan: Paula, you had your hand up.
Paula:The other thing in Labour's control, but not part of [00:15:00] its active campaigning, was how Labour was seen by those who might switch to the Liberal Democrats.
So, the Liberal Democrats believed strongly that in 2019, their failure to take seats they thought they might be because of potential voters beinganti-Corbyn or afraid of a Labour government after Starmer became Labour leader, which disappeared. In some of the data Starmer was more popular amongst Lib Dem voters than he was amongst than he was amongst Labour party voters. He didn't have that push-away factor that had been present in 2019.
So, things that Labour did certainly attracted some voters to themselves, but they also influenced the dynamics with other parties. And that dynamic with the liberal Democrats was hugely important for the Conservative losses in 2024.
Marta: Can I just jump in there as well and say that I think every voter when they decide whether to vote for a party tactically, probably has a list of [00:16:00] factors that makes a party acceptable or not. And a party must be part of the pool of acceptability for tactical voting, in order vote for that party. I think that by moving to the centre Labour entered the pool of acceptable parties for many voters. So that's a massive part of this story. I don't think you could have had the same story at all with Corbyn's party in 2019. But at the same time, these same factors are the factors that might be holding voters to Labour now, even though there's a threat of Reform.
The evidence that we see from the 2024 election is that's quite a plausible analysis of the [00:17:00] election dynamics.
Alan: I guess that fits in with the Morgan McSweeney view of how to win the next election - that you win the next election by keeping the voters who might be Reform tempted, in the camp.
And you expect that the fear of people on Labour's left flank of a Reform victory will be sufficient to keep them in the coalition as well. So you're suggesting that, based on the evidence that we see from the 2024 election, that's actually quite a plausible analysis of the election dynamics.
Jane: With the big caveat that Labour's the incumbent now and they don't have the Conservative incumbent to vote against. So if you are a left liberal, more progressive voter who might go to the Greens, who might go to the liberal Democrats, who might go to independents, then you know, they've lost that critical factor, which is: anyone but the Tories.
So keeping that coalition together isn't just about retaining Reform voters, it's also about retaining Green and Liberal Democrat voters who might now look at a Labour government and think, what's the point? Is Labour so much better?
Many will see that as true, but not everybody. You are relying on mobilization, you're relying on engagements, you're relying on people to really want to vote in a certain way in an election, rather than look at all the alternatives and think “I'm going to sit this one out”. I think it's a difficult thing to do. You risk alienating voters. You could try and just [00:18:00] count on them because Reform is so scary to them. But actually, you could also build consensus, find issues that don't divide, but bring that coalition together. Because Labour's main vote share is so much of that anti-incumbent vote, what they really need to be doing is growing their support, not just trying to hold onto what they've got and count on the rest going to back them regardless. So actually they need to increase their support.
They've lost a lot of support since last year already. They need to win that back. And it’s not just going to Reform. It’s splintering in all directions- mostly to undecided. So that's what I think they need to be doing. And it's broad appeal that they need, not one that trades off some voters and assumes that others can be counted on.
Alan: Great. Thank you. I hope we'll have time, before we finish to discuss further the current situation and the future dynamics. But we've been treading on the territory that's covered by Paula's article as well. So, we should bring in that article fully and explore it.
Paula, you look at underlying drivers of voting behaviour in your article. We [00:19:00] have two models of what shapes voting behaviour, what sorts of factors people are considering when they decide how they're going to vote. One of those focusing, as a lot of our conversation has been so far, on the perceived competence of leaders.The other focusing more on battle of values and ideologies and ideas and so on. You might want to say more about those models but also, I guess I'm particularly interested in what light does the 2024 election shed on the debates about those models of voting behaviour?
Paula: The paper sets those two models not entirely against each other, although the literature often does. Some writing before and after the 2024 election used this idea of a valence election. The Conservative Party had lost its reputation for competence, lost any trust that people had, and was so disliked.
Alan:We haven't used the word valence before, so we should explain what that means.
Paula:The valence model says whoever is most trusted, most [00:20:00] competent, has the strongest leadership team will be what voters choose because there's some sort of broad agreement on what voters want. They want certain types of delivery. In 2024 it’s a reduction in the cost of living, protection of the NHS, they choose the party that can deliver that. The Conservatives were failing on all these measures.
At one level, the story of the 2024 Election is simple. The Conservatives failed on all these measures. It's a simple valence story. We can finish there. Except if it were a simple valence story you would expect those voters to primarily switch to the alternative government, which could then deliver these things, and that's not what we see.
What we see in 2024 is that the Conservatives lost votes, but they lost them in all directions. They lost a small amount to Labour, some to the Liberal Democrats, lots to Reform, some to the Greens, a proportion that we don't yet properly know to staying at home. The [00:21:00] paper argues that it's those underlying value positions that people hold that explain where those voters went.
Having fallen out of love with the Conservatives in 2024, who they chose as an alternative depended on what their core values were. Now, by core values we meanthe kind of society we want to see. It's not a prescription of how things are, it's what we would like society to be like.
We often think of those as lying along two different dimensions. We have a dimension that's about economics, quite often just termed left and right. It's about things like taxation, redistribution of wealth, nationalization.
Then we have another dimension which gets called lots of different things, and which we could use a whole podcast just talking about what we should call that dimension. For the time being, we'llcall it the social dimension. It picks up attitudes to authority. It correlates with attitudes to immigration. It's separate [00:22:00] from people's economic position. How those dimensions combine to create distinctive groups helps us understand how they choose different political parties.
We often talk about a group on the left that switches between Labour and the Greens, but what we mean by that is the liberal left - those people who are both left-wing on economics and liberal on social issues. I nearly jumped in earlier when you talked about centrist voters because you can only have centrism in any kind of pure sense if you talk only about one dimension. We're talking about two dimensions. You'd have to be in the centre of both to be talking about centrist politics.
I sometimes think of the British electorate as a little mosaic of fragmented pieces that you can stick together to win an election. But those fragments break apart again, and you've got to stick them together in a different formation to win another election. That's the challenge facing the parties now. And it was the [00:23:00] challenge between 2019 and 2024.
Alan:Interesting that you pick up on centrists, what’s the meaning of “centrists”. I stopped myself there as well because I guess when I was talking about centrist, I was imagining that I was thinking about the swing voters in the middle, but the swing voters Morgan McSweeney seems to be concerned about, are in the left authoritarian corner of the spectrum. He’s worried about the swing between Labour and Reform within that quadrant. So not people in the centre at all, but they are perceived as key swing voters.
Paule: They're key swing voters because they're what we call cross-pressured. They're left on one scale and right on the other, so they don't fit comfortably within our party system. There is no party that is really trying to win that vote. When economicsare important in a cost-of-living crisis, they'relikely to be attracted to Labour. If immigration is an important thing to them, they're likely attracted to Reform.
Alan: Is it fair to say that's because our party system fundamentally has been organized around the economic dimension for many decades? It's [00:24:00] Brexit and the Brexit referendum that caused the second dimension, the social dimension, to rise in prominence? And now we have parties trying to fight on that dimension as well, but actually being very divided on it? You're making faces at me so I guess that's actually an oversimplification!
Paula:I think trying to distinguish cause and effect between the second dimension and Brexitis a bit of a chicken-and-egg question.
Parties were competing on that dimension before the referendum. The referendum correlated strongly with that dimension and split parties along it. But which came first? I don't think I'd say definitively. Marta?
Marta:Do you think people use the cultural dimension to find solutions for their economic grievances as well? A lot of it is still about the economy, but immigration starts to matter because voters think it's a solution for some of their economic grievances.
Paula:There's an interaction between immigration that is a poor example on that scale because it bleeds across both economic and social. But certainly, yeah, [00:25:00] there's an interaction between those two dimensions, which is important to people. We haven't got the time to go into it now, but the way the scales are measured rules out certain aspects of the economic dimension, critically- attitudes to welfare payments, which come into that interaction between the two in interesting ways.
Alan:Pretty much all democracies have seen a rise in the second dimension, the social dimension of politics, in recent years. It's not just Brexit causing that.
You mentioned measurement there, Paula, which is a nice segue into another point that I wanted us to explore a little bit, which is actually how we know about voting patterns in UK elections?
Jane, you are co-director of the British Election Study, the premier study of electoral behaviour in the UK and the attitudes underpinning it. Both of your articles are basedon British Election Study data, and other articles in the Political Quarterly special issue. Do you want to tell us about [00:26:00] the British Election Study, its origins, and why it's important in our understanding of elections?
Jane: Thanks, Alan. It's always an honour to talk about the British Election Study. We've looked after it for a while now. We are custodians of this amazing resource that supports all academics, as well as political journalists, and those members of the public who are very interested in politics, through our analysis, through the research that we do, but also through our attempts to disseminate that.
It's been running since 1963.Every general election has a post-election survey that's been a high-quality random probability survey. So that allows us to look at these very significant changes over time.
One of the things we're able to do is analyse the degree to which that's a bottom-up story. Is itinevitable? Or how much of that is politics? We can look at long-term changes. The British Election Study has expanded drastically since before we started looking after it, but also [00:27:00] since 2013 when we started to have that responsibility for designing surveys. We now have very large panel studies. So these are 30,000 people that are surveyed over and over. Many of the same people get re surveyed, people drop in and they enter, and we are always refreshing that to making sure it's a representative snapshot of the population at large.
The primary reason is to look at dynamics and change. We can look at how people voted in the Brexit referendum, what they're doing now, how they voted in the last election, what they intend to do now, and how they're responding to different political changes. And then the key thing is that the survey items, the content, gives the broadest possible suite of different things that anyone would need to use if they wanted to understand British elections today, voters are non-voters. We ensure this is the [00:28:00] most broad, intellectually driven resource. It's not our pet project. It's for everybody.
Marta can look at tactical voting. So it's not just enough for you could just look at constituencies, you can say, ‘look, the Liberal Democrats picked up these. Those were the types of races’. To understand it properly, you've got to know what people thought. With the British Election Study, we've tried as much as possible to ask Paula’s values questions over and over so that she can look at change over time. Those valence items you might think are relevant. In the long term, that’s the foundational structure of electoral behaviour. But we also look at what's changing, what do we need to start asking about, because politics is evolving. That's the broad picture of the British Election Study.
Alan:One of the nice things is that it's all freely available and it's freely available in a way that stats whizzes, like Paula and Marta, can analyse the data in depth. But it's also available in a form that someone who doesn't have lots of statistical training can go in there and find [00:29:00] out the patterns on particular questions and do some simple analysis. It'san incredible resource we're all very grateful for. Thank you, Jane, for that.
Before we wrap up, a little bit more about the future and what we can say based on this kind of analysis. We were having a bit of conversation earlier on about tactical voting and patterns in tactical voting. I was very struck that you suggested that the absence of tactical voting on the right was because the incumbent party was on the right, and therefore, voters of the other right-wing party were not inclined to go to that incumbent. Should we expect therefore that patterns of tactical voting are likely to be different at the next election, and that there might be greater willingness to vote tactically on the right and rather lesser willingness to vote tactically on the left? Marta?
Marta: To some degree. One aspect is tactical voting, another is vote flows. Fragmentation is part of this. Labour [00:30:00] needs to care about whether the right is unified or fragmented, right? It could become unified through tactical voting against Labour, but it could also become unified if all the conservative voters just switch to Reform or vice versa.
On the other hand, labour need to be careful about not losing their current tactical coalition. They are the incumbents, so I do think it makes it harder. Potentially if they don't perform well they will lose that coalition of voters. On the other, tactical voting really depends on who is on the other side. We've seen across different contexts in Europe, France especially, how voters do rally around any party when that party is against a right-wing party. Reform could be as much a threat as a Conservative government. And labour needs to figure out how much they can detach themselves from these liberal voters, whilst these voters still vote for them. So it's a bit of a tricky question.
And [00:31:00] also the other important thing is that our paper shows not all votes are equal. Labour losing 1% of their vote share in specific seats can make their whole coalition crumble. Whereas, not in places where you have big majority. So I think when we look at Labour voting intentions going up and down, it's important to really think about where these intentions of changing.
Alan: Jane, you were looking very sceptical when I was asking that question.
Jane: Last year wasn't just the anti-incumbent vote, it was also the foregone conclusion nature of the election. Why could Labour win so many seats with its vote share going down, people staying at home? Because they were just secure, knowing Labour's going to win anyway. It was also an election where all the modelling, all the polling, these big analyses of projections from polls to seats, were saying that Labour was going to win this big election majority, and going to win it in the way that they did. The next election is likely to be more tightly contested.
People that didn't vote in 2024 are likelyto vote in the next [00:32:00] election. It's going to be really difficult for anyone to know what the outcome's going to be because it's so much more knife edge now. It's so much more sensitive to small changes.
So can Labour count on those people that didn't bother to vote for Labour because they thought they were going to win anyway the next time around? Or is that Reform competition going to mobilize people to the same degree? It's not just about tactical voting, it's also about tactical non-voting.
Alan: Paula, do you have any kind of final reflections on what we can say about the present and the future, on the basis of what you've analysed in your article?
Paula: So if we look back at the last parliament... we're still in Johnson's heyday. So much can happen in the future that is entirely unpredictable. We are layering that on top of an electorate that are unpredictable, that are willing to move around between parties, and that don't form big, coherent blocks. And those two things make it really difficult to make any solid predictions about the future.
But I think there's one thingwe know will continue. Theunderlying fragmentation will not go away. It could be that at the next election, some party manages to put all the pieces together and win 60% of the vote. That wouldn't mean the fragmentation had gone away. It would just mean that party had been [00:34:00] successful at bringing the pieces together. The underlying fragmentation is still there.
The big question for the future... I've got this beautiful chart, which I cannot show you in audio, but it's got a grey line, which shows the share of the vote for the parties outside the big three. I've included the Liberal Democrats in that. It shoots up in 2015, it dips away in 17 and 19, and shoots up again in 2024. The big question is, where that line goes next, is it continuing upwards so that at some point we end up with the big party's being a minority share,or does it dropagain? That's a big unanswerable question for the next election. I wouldn't even toss a coin to find out.
Alan: The moral is: watch this space and there will be much more analysis still to come. It has been a privilege to be in a room with the three of you today. Thank you so much. I could have asked questions all day long, but sadly, we cannot do that. But, thank you- great to hear your thoughts Jane, Marta and Paula.
[00:35:00] We've been talking about two articles from the Political Quarterly Special Edition on the 2024 general election in the UK. They are: by Marta Miori and Jane Green. The article is called The Most Disproportionate UK Election, How The Labour Party Doubled Its Seat Share with a 1.6 Point Increase in Vote Share in 2024.
The second article is by Paula Surridge called Values in the Valence Election Fragmentation and the 2024 General Election. There are other articles on gender, ethnicity, main political parties, local campaigning, and other themes. You'll find details in the show notes for Political Quarterly. It is a journal that, much like this podcast, seeks to make the latest research about politics and policy accessible and relevant to wider audiences. So it is definitely well worth exploring.
To make sure you don't miss future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics. All you need to do is subscribe You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts [00:36:00] or whatever provider you use. We'd love it if you could rate or review us.
I am Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham and Kaiser Kang. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.