The Changing Shape of Politics: Rethinking Left and Right in a New Britain

ISBN-13: 9783030039394 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 173 str.

Jonathan Wheatley

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Introduction: British politics in turbulent times

Chapter 2: Beyond left and right: The end of an old order?

Chapter 3: Patterns of Political Competition

Chapter 4: Towards a more Polarised Britain?

Chapter 5: The European Perspective

Chapter 6: Conclusion. Making sense of it all

Appendix1: Analysis of British Election Study (BES) data

Appendix 2: European Political parties

Appendix 3: Cleaning and Preprocessing VAA-Generated Data

Appendix 4: Mokken Scale Analysis

Appendix 5: Regression Results

O autorze

Jonathan Wheatley is a lecturer in Comparative Politics at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He has published widely on democratization in post-communist countries; parties, party systems and political cleavages in both established and developing democracies; and the development and deployment of voting advice applications (VAAs).

Blurb

"A lucid, evidence-packed analysis which persuasively argues that, in an age of austerity and insecurity, where we might have expected economic concerns to trump everything else, cultural rather than class differences now constitute the essential terrain on which today’s (and tomorrow’s) political battles will be fought."

—Tim Bale, Queen Mary University of London, UK

This book investigates whether politics in Britain in the twenty-first century is driven more by issues of culture and identity than by “left versus right” issues of wealth distribution. Drawing from a number of opinion surveys, it explores the shifting positions of voters on both economic matters and matters of culture and identity. It finds that between 2015 and 2017 support for Britain's main political parties became much more predicated on issues of culture and identity, reflecting a radical change in how parties attract voters. In the longer-term, it suggests that issues of culture and identity have become more salient overall, possibly because of the oft-cited divide between winners and losers of globalisation. The book ends by speculating on why politics has become more polarised on these issues, rather than on the economic fallout of globalisation, and suggests that an explanation is to be found in changing forms of political communication between voters and politicians.