October 2022
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2 Reads
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2 Citations
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Publications (23)
August 2022
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3 Reads
May 2022
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43 Reads
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8 Citations
Parliamentary Affairs
Taking place amid a global pandemic, the 2021 Senedd Election saw Welsh Labour returned as the largest party at the sixth consecutive occasion since the institution’s founding in 1999. Results for opposition parties were mixed: the Conservatives achieved their highest ever vote share but their seat tally fell short of pre-election expectations, and Plaid Cymru again made little progress. Using data from the 2021 Welsh Election Study, we explore the election campaign and results, and offer a first analysis of vote choice. We find that Labour not only benefitted from incumbency advantages drawn from voters’ approval of the Welsh Government’s handling of the pandemic, but through its use of symbols, branding and messaging, the party continues to remain attuned to a national identity position that broadly aligns with that of the electorate as a whole.
March 2022
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9 Reads
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2 Citations
Political Insight
December 2021
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6 Reads
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5 Citations
Political Insight
November 2021
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5 Reads
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1 Citation
As the final week of the campaign began, the battle to frame the election was largely over. All the parties could do now was to play their strongest cards one last time. The final days of the election produced some memorable moments, including an unusual media controversy which began with Prime Minister Boris Johnson pocketing a journalist’s smartphone and ended with a row about false claims of a fracas in front of a hospital. However, such colourful events did not change the underlying dynamic of the election, and as the results were announced, it soon became clear that the Conservatives were on course for a historic victory. Historic Conservative victories in seat after seat of the historically Labour ‘Red Wall’ provided the main drama of election night, but there were other memorable moments. Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson narrowly lost her seat the SNP, capping a poor night for her party, which once again failed to recover from its time in the Coalition, and a strong night for SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, presiding once again over a landslide win in Scotland. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn pledged to stand down after a ‘period of reflection’, but his colleagues seemed in no mood to reflect as internal arguments about Labour’s third successive defeat began even as the votes were still being counted. Speaking to voters at dawn the next day, the Prime Minister promised to ‘repay the trust’ of the voters who had lent his party their support.
November 2021
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8 Reads
This chapter details the prominent set-piece events on broadcast media during the election campaign—lead news bulletins, interviews and leader debates. It documents the challenges of staging and negotiating those interviews and debates for broadcasters (and political parties), the events that were cancelled due to failures to reach agreement, and controversies—such as Channel 4’s staging of a melting ice sculpture in place of Boris Johnson for its leaders’ climate debate, and the BBC’s failure to get Boris Johnson to sit down for an interview with Andrew Neil.
November 2021
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5 Reads
On the morning of 13 December 2019, Britain’s pollsters stood vindicated, banishing memories of the disaster of 2015 and the rather mixed performance in 2017. This chapter tells the story of the ebb and flow of party support—as revealed by the polls—between June 2017 and December 2019. It explores the initial honeymoon enjoyed by Labour, aftesr its surprise performance in the previous election, the collapse of support for Theresa May’s Conservatives around specific events related to Brexit and infighting within the Conservative Party, and the fragmentation of electoral support that, for a while, made it look like British politics was turning Dutch—as support for the Conservatives and Labour collapsed, and the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats briefly threatened to usurp their traditional dominance of British politics. It will also trace the declining authority of both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, and how their diminishment with voters set the scene for the arrival of Boris Johnson and the crushing election defeat for Labour.
November 2021
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3 Reads
The 2019 general election delivered the first substantial Conservative majority since 1987. A lot was at stake in the 2019 election, making this decisive outcome a historically significant one. The contest was the culmination of three years of fraught political argument over Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and provided a final opportunity for the British public to confirm or reject the referendum mandate for departure delivered three years earlier. By returning the first sizeable parliamentary majority for the Conservative Party in a generation, Britain’s voters ensured that their Prime Minister would indeed ‘get Brexit done’ and set the country on a new political path. But the election’s implications stretched beyond the high politics of Brexit negotiations. The Conservatives’ new majority was the culmination of an unprecedented two-decade advance. Labour’s electoral collapse called an end to the party’s four-year experiment under veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn—an experiment which, for a brief moment in 2017 looked capable, against all the odds, of delivering the UK’s most left-wing government since the Second World War. As the Conservatives’ base broadened, Labour’s narrowed, with the party retreating to big-city and university seats where graduates, young people and ethnic minorities congregate. Geographical disadvantage magnified the scale of Labour’s defeat, reducing the party to its smallest Commons cohort in over 80 years.
November 2021
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10 Reads
In terms of vote share, the 2017 election appeared to usher back the two-party politics that had characterised British (or at least English) politics for much of the post-war period. But the resulting hung parliament and the deep divides over Brexit meant a much larger parliamentary role for the UK’s smaller parties. At the same time, fractures within each of the ‘big two’ meant that there were also regular calls for the formation of ‘new’ political parties, with the existing alternatives to Labour and the Conservatives not always seen as credible.
Citations (10)
... Boris Johnson was overwhelmingly successful in the EU-focussed general election of 2019, when he promised to 'Get Brexit Done'. He gained the backing of those voters who had supported leaving the EU, won far more marginal seats than Labour, and limited the swings against the party in those Conservative areas that were less keen on Brexit or on Johnson himself (Ford et al. 2022). Under Johnson, the Conservatives appeared to combine a move to the left on economics-through a rhetoric of 'levelling up' for voters in the 'red wall' of traditional Labour seats-with rightwing social conservatism, particularly around immigration, and an 'Anglo-British' conception of nationalism (Cooper and Cooper 2020;Gamble 2021;Hayton 2021;Hickson and Williams 2023). ...
- Citing Article
March 2022
Political Insight
... One final difference between Welshness, Scottishness, and Englishness is related to party choice. In the 2021 Senedd election, the more Welsh a respondent felt, relative to feeling British, the more likely they were to vote for Plaid Cymru and the less likely they were to vote Conservative (Larner et al. 2022). Fieldhouse et al. find that, among 2010 Labour voters, Scottishness was not statistically significant in predicting an SNP vote before the Scottish independence referendum but it was afterwards (Fieldhouse et al. 2019 , Table A8.3). ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
May 2022
Parliamentary Affairs
... While the issue of radicalisation is not a new one, in the recent years there has been a perceived increase in far-right radicalisation (Kleinberg, van der Vegt and Gill, 2020;Collins, 2021), alongside the consistent threat from the Islamic State. As we enter a new period of economic struggle, the politics of the nation have become more polarised, with party leaders often adopting a binary approach to solving contemporary political issues (Surridge, 2021). Due to the increase in information and communication, combined with ease of access through social media (Séraphin, Divina and Ghayda, 2017), there are particular concerns over the threat of far-right radicalisation becoming more prominent in younger people. ...
- Citing Article
December 2021
Political Insight
... The UK is characterised by relatively high levels of affective polarisation compared to other European democracies (Gidron, Adams and Horne, 2019), rendering it a case where negative partisan identities should have an effect on costly mobilisation. At the same time, Brexit-related issue identities were prevalent and highly salient during the 2019 election (Ford et al., 2021). This makes it an ideal case for comparing the power of issue and partisan, as well as negative and positive identities. ...
- Citing Chapter
November 2021
... The Conservatives were re-elected to government for the fourth consecutive time and with an increased seat and vote share, contrary to what the model priors indicated. Moreover, the election was dubbed the ''Brexit election'' in which the government's ''Get Brexit Done'' campaign slogan seemed to resonate and other issues-including the economy-were sidelined (Ford, Tim, Jennings, & Surridge, 2021). Kenny and Lewis-Beck (2024b) showed that the predictive power of political economy forecasting models drops dramatically when taking into account the 2019 election result, for which the model specification just does not work. ...
- Citing Article
January 2021
... The task of maintaining their electoral coalitions is now a vital element of competition for the major parties' in a two-party contest for government. It is still possible to accomplish, as both major parties did in 2017 and the Conservatives did again in 2019 (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2018;Ford et al., 2022). ...
- Citing Book
January 2021
... In a nationwide referendum on 23 June 2016, after months of polarized campaigning, millions of British citizens cast a vote either against or in favor of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. The divide between the Leave and Remain camps has been the primary analytical lens in understanding British politics since then (Surridge, 2021). Hobolt, Leeper, and Tilley (2020) show that the polarization triggered by the referendum continues to divide British society even as EU membership and EU integration have not always been the most salient issue since 2016. ...
- Citing Article
March 2021
Political Insight
... Furthermore, based on a subset of these questions, more concrete and realistic scenario simulation data were generated as a supplement for testing. Following the seven value-based segments of the UK public as defined in "More in Common" and YouGov's 2020 Britain's Choice report [21], we utilize GPT-4o-mini for LLM personalization to collect personalized preference data across our questionnaire. As shown in Figure 2, FAIR-PP contains 34,089 survey questions and 238,623 personalized preference data points, with key features including sources from real social survey, comprehensive content, and automated data generation. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
December 2020
The Political Quarterly
... Despite the prominence of maritime narratives in the campaign and referendum, and the enduring political, economic and security importance of these issues in the subsequent negotiations, this dimension of Brexit is largely underrepresented in the academic literature. Brexit has predominantly been examined through the lens of economic impacts (Sampson 2017;Tetlow and Stojanovic 2018); causation and history (Arnorsson and Zoega 2018;Clarke et al. 2017); geopolitics and international relations (Colantone and Stanig 2018;Bachmann and Sidaway 2018); British politics (Cutts et al. 2020;Evans and Menon 2017); and identity and nationalism (Tilley and Hobolt 2023;Outhwaite 2019;Sobolewska and Ford 2020). ...
- Citing Article
February 2020
The Political Quarterly
... The July 2016 speech remains important however as an indicator of the disruptive effects of the Brexit referendum on political elites and alignments. Conservative leaders would reposition themselves in relation to what Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford called 'Brexitland' (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020; see also Surridge, 2018Surridge, , 2021. This new landscape was marked by the political salience of values over the traditional predominance of class and economic preferences. ...
- Citing Article
December 2018
Political Insight