The Death of May’s Law: Intra- and Inter-Party Value Differences in Britain’s Labour and Conservative Parties
| Author | Alan Wager,Tim Bale,Philip Cowley,Anand Menon |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721995632 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721995632
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(4) 939 –961
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321721995632
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The Death of May’s Law:
Intra- and Inter-Party Value
Differences in Britain’s Labour
and Conservative Parties
Alan Wager1, Tim Bale2, Philip Cowley2
and Anand Menon3
Abstract
Party competition in Great Britain increasingly revolves around social or ‘cultural’ issues as much
as it does around the economic issues that took centre stage when class was assumed to be
dominant. We use data from surveys of members of parliament, party members and voters to
explore how this shift has affected the internal coalitions of the Labour and Conservative Parties –
and to provide a fresh test of ‘May’s Law’. We find a considerable disconnect between ‘neoliberal’
Conservative members of parliament and their more centrist voters on economic issues and
similarly significant disagreement on cultural issues between socially liberal Labour members of
parliament and their more authoritarian voters. We also find differences in both parties between
parliamentarians and their grassroots members, albeit that these are much less pronounced. May’s
Law, not for the first time, appears not to be borne out in reality.
Keywords
political values, realignment, intra-party politics, Conservative Party, Labour Party
Accepted: 18 January 2021
Across Western Europe party politics has undergone profound change. Social values that
vary with age and education matter more as class and party loyalties matter less. The driv-
ers of these changes include the emergence of education as a key variable explaining
voters’ attitudes and choices, increasing geographical polarisation between the ‘centre’
and the ‘periphery’, and populations that are getting older and more ethnically diverse
(Kriesi et al., 2012; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020; Van der Brug and Rekker, 2020). These
long-term socio-economic developments tilt party systems broadly away from historical
cleavages centred around class and economic status, upon which most parties and party
1Policy Institute, King’s College London, London, UK
2School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
3Department of European & International Studies, King’s College London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Alan Wager, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: alan.wager@kcl.ac.uk
995632PSX0010.1177/0032321721995632Political StudiesWager et al.
research-article2021
Article
940 Political Studies 70(4)
systems – including the dominance of the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK
(McKenzie, 1955) – were originally built, and towards what are often broadly termed
‘cultural’ or ‘social’ issues.
Comparative discussion of the changing nature of party systems has tended to draw on
cases where their fragmentation has led to new parties forming on this emerging cultural
or values cleavage (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020), either through increasing support for
radical right parties (Kriesi et al., 2006) or green and liberal parties (Alber, 2018).
Alternatively, the focus has been on the decline of mainstream parties of either the centre
right (Bale and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2021; Spoon and Klüver, 2019) or particularly the
centre left (Benedetto et al., 2020). Meanwhile, in the UK it was long assumed that the
‘thawing’ of the country’s traditional class-based structure of party competition would
lead to the fragmentation of the two-party system (Curtice, 2010).
In fact, what occurred was more complicated. The Scottish National Party’s seeming
hegemony in Scotland, a decade of electoral volatility (Fieldhouse et al., 2019), and
second-order elections that have seen both populist radical right and liberal parties
prosper (Cutts et al., 2019) have certainly tested the British party system. Yet, the
Conservative and Labour parties have survived intact as institutions without either’s
collapse or wholesale replacement, albeit with markedly different levels of recent elec-
toral success. Rather than the decline of the UK’s two-party system becoming inevita-
ble, it has if anything reversed: in 2017, the two main parties took 82.4% of the UK
vote, the largest since 1970; and even after a dip in 2019, the two-party vote share still
stood at 75.7%, the largest combined Conservative–Labour total since 1992. This
prompts a puzzle: what does the process of realignment do to the internal coalition of
parties that survive a significant churn in their electoral support triggered by cultural
issues?
Of course, any such realignment does not render economic differences and atti-
tudes meaningless. To paraphrase Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) famous ‘freezing
hypothesis’, as political parties have attempted to adapt to the new electoral context
of the 2020s, they still hope, at least to some degree, to represent ‘the cleavage struc-
tures of the 1920s’ (see also Mair, 1998). Voters, and parties, adjust to the importance
of cultural and social issues without necessarily abandoning their economic values
(Surridge, 2020).
The job of navigating this conflict between the ‘old’ politics of class and the ‘new’
politics of social identity falls to those who make up political parties: members of parlia-
ment (MPs), party activists and party members. Indeed, it may fall on those who – in most
instances – will have been attracted to a party for its ideological position on one dimen-
sion of political competition to redefine that party so that it can viably represent a position
on a different political axis. This is perhaps particularly true within party systems like
Britain’s where the barriers to entry are higher, and where, therefore, ‘old’ rather than new
challenger parties are more likely to do the supply side work of adjusting to changes in
the demand side of party politics.
Understanding where the different sections of parties – elites, members and voters –
stand in relation to one another on ideological questions matters, both to voters and to
those within political parties. It lets voters compare their social and economic views to
those they vote for to represent them. We go beyond the rhetoric and policy positions of
parties to understand the ‘black box’ of parties as ideological coalitions. In turn, this is
obviously also of interest to party strategists – telling parties where they are most discon-
nected from voters, and which sections of their internal coalition are most likely to cause
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