Explaining Support for the UK Independence Party at the 2009 European Parliament Elections

Abstract

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) achieved its best result in the 2009 European elections, beating the governing Labour Party into second place. Despite its recent success we still know relatively little about who votes for the party and how these supporters compare with those of UKIP's competitors. This article analyses support for UKIP at the 2009 European elections first at the aggregate level, to understand the social and economic context in which the party performs best, and second at the individual level using a YouGov survey of over 32,000 voters, more than 4,000 of whom were UKIP supporters. We show that Euroscepticism is the biggest explanatory factor but that UKIP voters are also concerned about immigration and show dissatisfaction with and a lack of trust in the political system. Our findings add credence to the argument that views on European integration matter in voters' decisions at European elections and we show how the balance of attitudinal explanations of UKIP support makes its voters distinct from those voting for far right parties.

Acknowledgements

This research is funded by a Leverhulme Research Project Grant (reference F/00 212/AD). We are grateful to Joe Twyman of YouGov for making the polling data available to us. Thanks also go to Elisabeth Carter, Ben Clements, Andrew Geddes and the journal's referees for comments and suggestions. We are grateful to Gemma Loomes for her invaluable research assistance.

Notes

Census data are available at <http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/census2001.asp>.

These migration data are available at <http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/niall/index.php?page=nino_allocation>.

These parties are the English Democrats, Libertas and the United Kingdom First Party.

Our multivariate analysis of party vote shares at the local authority level excludes Scotland and Wales due to the different party systems there.

The Tomz et al. technique was implemented in Stata using Clarify (Tomz et al., 2001; King et al., 2000).

Results of the other regressions are available from the authors on request.

Migration is, however, a contributory factor in support for UKIP in some rural areas of Lincolnshire and eastern England that have with high proportions of migrant workers (e.g. Boston). But these constituencies also often have relatively high numbers of agricultural workers and elderly voters, and fewer professionals.

Results for comparisons with other parties in the multinomial logistic regression are available from the authors on request.

Predicted probabilities were calculated using SPost (Long & Freese, 2005) for variables that were significant in the model. They are based on a male voter, aged 55–64, residing in the South West region, with other variables set to their mean or, for categorical variables, modal value.