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New paper from me, Olli Heath, Humphrey Southall and Paula Aucott, just out in @polstudies.bsky.social: The rise and fall of class voting in Britain, 1885–2024 We link ~140 years of census and election data to map the relationship between class and vote in Britain doi.org/10.1177/0032...

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We show that there is clear evidence of class Lib-Con voting in the late Victorian era, but the Liberals were rapidly supplanted and surpassed by the emergence of Labour in the first decades of the 20th century.

Once established, the Lab-Con class relationship was remarkably stable from the 1920s into the 1990s, at which point the class-Lab association begins to decline, and then the class-Con association shifts more abruptly in 2017-19.

Using a Bayesian changepoint model, we try and pin down when the class-vote association changed: the stabilisation of class voting in the 1920s; a brief drop for Labour after the Second World War; and then a more significant turn for Labour in the Blair era, and the Conservative around Brexit.

This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between Olli, me, and Humphrey and Paula, who are the historical geographers behind www.visionofbritain.org.uk. It's the first peer-reviewed paper to come out of the project, but we've got a lot more data, so hopefully it will be the first of many!

visionofbritain.org.ukA Vision of Britain through Time | Your national on-line library for local history | Maps, Statistics, Travel Writing and moreA vision of Britain through time...