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The United Kingdom 2017 election: polarisation in a split issue space

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-03-06, 13:51 authored by Cristian Vaccari, Kaat Smets, Oliver Heath
After decades in which party competition was fought in the centre ground, the 2017 UK General Election witnessed a return to more conflictual politics. This article assesses public support for the electoral strategies of the main parties and examines the extent to which the issues the parties campaigned on resonated with their own supporters, as well as with the wider public. Drawing on the issue-yield framework, the article shows that the Conservative campaign – generally considered to be badly run – did not focus on issues that would fully exploit the opportunities for expanding support that were open to the party. Labour, by contrast, played a much better hand. While taking a clear left-wing stance on many policies that were popular with its constituency, the party also skilfully emphasised valence issues that Labour is often seen as more credible on, such as healthcare and education.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

West European Politics

Volume

43

Issue

3

Pages

587 - 609

Citation

VACCARI, C., SMETS, K. and HEATH, O., 2019. The United Kingdom 2017 election: polarisation in a split issue space. West European Politics, 43 (3), pp.587-609.

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Publisher statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in West European Politics on 1 October 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01402382.2019.1655961.

Acceptance date

2019-02-18

Publication date

2019-10-01

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

1743-9655

eISSN

0140-2382

Language

  • en