Who cares about the culture war?

Using the extent that a respondent agreed with the policies of their candidates, I find that culture war policies do not stand out as having any particularly unique effect on voters compared to other economic and non-economic issues. Instead, all these issues seem to play some role in who someone decides to vote for. Voters certainly incorporate their culture war beliefs when deciding who to vote for, but economic and long-standing non-economic policies still also move votes.

Data also allows us to look at the effect of culture war policies on voting behaviour individually.

The results above show that culture war issues consistently motivate ‘orthodox’ respondents yet has an inconsistent effect on the behaviour of those with ‘progressive’ attitudes. For example, ‘orthodox’ respondents voted against all candidates in the experiment who put forward progressive policies and significantly voted for all those proposing more conservative policies. However, only three issues impacted the vote of progressives (same-sex parents in children’s TV, mandatory diversity training and diversifying the curriculum) with the rest being insignificant.

We can also consider whether voters with different broader political values are more or less motivated by the culture war. Their answers to long-established survey questions allow us to group respondents into four groups based on their economic (left-right) and non-economic (liberal-conservative) political values:

Economically left-wing, socially conservative (Left-Traditionalists)
Economically left-wing, socially liberal (Left-Libertarians)
Economically right-wing, socially conservative (Right-Traditionalists)
Economically right-wing, socially liberal (Right-Libertarians)

The table below shows the policies that had the biggest effect on these four groups’ vote choice, with culture war issues highlighted in bold.

Those who are economically left and socially liberal place little importance on candidates’ positions on culture war issues. Instead, they prioritise economic (six out of the top ten) and traditional non-economic (four out of the top ten) issues.

In contrast, economically right-wing, socially conservative voters clearly prioritise culture war, as well as traditional non-economic, issues. Two of this group’s top issues are culture war-related (statues and transwomen athletes). Those who are economically left-wing and socially conservative are also motivated by culture war issues, but to a lesser extent than economically right-wing, socially conservative voters. Instead, economically left-wing, socially conservative voters are most concerned with immigration and asylum policies.

Why might culture war issues have played a bigger role for people with more traditional social values? Partly, this may be because politicians and media on this side of politics were emphasising the issues referred to in the survey – such as Suella Braverman ending diversity training in her department and Rishi Sunak campaigning to stop ‘woke nonsense’.

A different theory is that, as the Conservative Party – a likely choice of these voters – was in government, these respondents already felt they had some control over economic and traditional non-economic issues, but not over cultural issues which are outside governmental direct control. This feeling may be exacerbated by Britain still experiencing progressive cultural change under a Conservative government, which these voters may feel has failed to sufficiently counteract.

At the same time, the fact that progressives do not consistently vote for progressive cultural change implies a divide between the priorities of progressive activists who push for said cultural change, and less engaged progressive voters. Instead, these voters tend to be more concerned with economic and long-standing non-economic issues.

Certain periods have seen culture wars rise and fall in prominence. These issues may be important to party competition now, but may play less (or more) of a role in the future. New issues will continually emerge in the ever-evolving landscape of cultural battles, and could motivate orthodox and progressive voters to act in different ways in the future.

By James Breckwoldt, PhD candidate, University of Manchester.

James’s full research paper is available here.

Source link : https://ukandeu.ac.uk/who-cares-about-the-culture-war/

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Publish date : 2024-01-10 08:00:00

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