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ABSTRACT
A factor that may account for the largely unanticipated victory of Brexit in 2016 is the difference in engagement, mobilization, and, ultimately, turnout between those for whom the question of Brexit was a valence issue (a dry and almost technical question of determining the policies by which uncontroversial shared ends can be achieved) and those for whom it was a positional issue (a question of raw, almost visceral, political preference). The declining appeal of valence politics may reveal a phenomenon that goes beyond Brexit and Britain: a change in the nature and character of contemporary electoral competition that may help to explain the newly resurgent populism characteristic of Western liberal democracies.
Notes
1 See Hix Citation2018 for an analysis on where the UK-EU relationship is heading. See Heath and Goodwin Citation2017 on the impact of Brexit on the UK 2017 general election result.
2 See Hay Citation2020 for a discussion of the predictability of Brexit and of how the pollsters’ underestimation of the likelihood of a vote for Brexit influenced the outcome of the election.
3 Here, “valence politics” refers to the operation of recasting a positional issue as a valence issue, not to Stokes’s critique of spatial models of political competition (see Evrenk Citation2019).
4 Financial Times, June 3, 2016.
5 The European Economic Community is the precursor of the European Union. In 1975, it was constituted by nine countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the United Kingdom.
6 Jeffrey Friedman (Citation2019, ch. 6), presents the rise of Trump, too, as a rejection of expertise, but Friedman does not think that this type of populism is particularly new; and he contends that it amounts not to a rejection of valence politics, but a configuration of them in terms that are understandable to voters disconnected from elite discussions of the complexities of valence policies.
7 These data are part of a project led by Stephen Farrall (University of Derby), The Long-term Impact of Thatcherism: Crime, Politics and Inequality, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (April 2017-March 2020).
8 The items for the survey were selected following two rounds of interviewing, two field experiments, and a pilot survey during 2018. Items were grouped into seven batteries: “behavioral Thatcherism” (with proxies ranging from business ownership to consumption patterns); neoliberal values; socially conservative values; beliefs about Thatcher and Thatcherism; social nostalgia; economic nostalgia; and political nostalgia.
9 In the survey, agreement with the following propositions is used as a proxy for socially conservative values: “Young people today don’t have enough respect for traditional values”; “For some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence”; “People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences”; “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Agreement with the following propositions is used as a proxy for neoliberal values: “Ordinary working people get their fair share of the nation’s wealth”; “There is no need for strong trade unions to protect employees’ working conditions and wages”; “Private enterprise is the best way to solve Britain’s economic problems”; “Major public services and industries ought not to be in state ownership”; “It would be better for everyone if we all paid less tax”; “Welfare benefits should be reserved for only the extremely needy.”Agreement with the following propositions is used as a proxy for economic nostalgia: “I feel that there has been a loss of community spirit around here since the 1980s”; “The profit motive has come to dominate all aspects of our society”; “The reliance on market forces has increased the gap between rich and poor”; “It feels to me like the country lost something when coal mines, steel mills and shipyards closed.” Though selected in the survey to capture a sense of economic nostalgia, it is easy to see these responses as also tapping into a certain socialist value set typically expressed by millennial Corbynites. For the wording of the survey items on social and political nostalgia and for further details on its methodology, see Farrall et al. Citation2020, 13–14.
10 The Guardian, September 7, 2019.
11 As such, Brexit could be regarded as inaugurating in Britain a form of post-neoliberalism. While many observers have assumed that critiques of neoliberalism could stem only from the left, a range of recent political events indicate that it is primarily from the populist right that neoliberalism is currently being challenged at the mass level (Hay and Benoît Citation2018).