O'Grady, Tom; Wiedemann, Andreas; (2024) How the Geographic Clustering of Young and Highly-Educated Voters Undermines Redistributive Politics. The Journal of Politics 10.1086/729939. (In press).

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Abstract

We analyze support for the welfare state across time and space in Great Britain. Using multilevel regression and post-stratification with historical data and an original survey, we show that a virtually identical majority of people supported those policies in the mid-1990s and in 2020, but patterns of support were very different. Young and highly-educated people are now the strongest supporters, as are the youngest and most highly-educated geographic areas, mirroring divides over ’second-dimension’ issues like Brexit. However, young and highlyeducated voters are clustered in a small number of places, with the Labour party struggling to win moderately-educated and moderately-young areas. As a result, the Left’s problem in majoritarian systems is not the rise of second-dimension politics per se, but rather how its supporters are distributed spatially along that dimension. A majority of voters in favor of welfare and redistribution no longer translates as easily into winning a majority of places in support.

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