Abstract
This paper demonstrates the apparent assimilation of the European issue by the Conservative parliamentary party between 1997 and 2005. It does this through a cluster analysis of British Representation Survey data, which allows an assessment of the impact of Europe on the attitudinal cohesion of the party. This confirms the widespread impression that the Conservatives seem to have absorbed this issue and thus staved off the threat of internal fragmentation that once loomed over them. It is argued, however, that the potential for future intra-party conflict around this cleavage cannot be dismissed. Electoral recovery and a return to national governmental office hold the potential to re-open divisions over Europe.
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Notes
Simple correlation analysis suggests that this remained broadly true at the time of the 2005 general election. Respondent attitude towards EU membership correlated only weakly with left–right indicators such as self-placement on a Left–Right scale (r=0.20) and on a Tax-Spend scale (r=−0.08). Both correlations were significant at the 0.01 level (n=3499 and 3971, respectively). Data are from the British Election Survey 2005, for which I am grateful to the BES directors Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart, David Sanders and Paul Whiteley.
In all, 5.8% of BES respondents nominated ‘relations with Europe’ and ‘Euro membership’ among the most important issues facing the country, leaving it behind health (18.8%), law and order (13.7%), immigration (11.6%), economy/unemployment (9.5%), Iraq/terrorism (7.5%), asylum-seekers (7.3%) and education (6.3%). In 2001, Europe may well have been even less salient for the average British voter; although the BES lacked a saliency measure in 2001, MORI data suggest that Europe was merely the 11th most important issue in helping people decide how to vote (poll conducted on behalf of The Economist, 10–14 May 2001, www.mori.com).
Note that the first versions of these attitudinal scales were created and tested for validity and reliability by Heath et al. (1993). Each of these scales is constructed from survey responses to a set of six questions on related themes, one measuring location on the socialism/capitalism dimension, the other measuring location on the libertarianism/authoritarianism dimension. Principal components analysis of the scale items using BES and BRS data from 1992 and 1997 showed that they loaded onto two orthogonal attitudinal factors. Unfortunately, it is not possible to recreate identical scales with the later BRS data sets from 2001 and 2005, since some of the individual items from which they are constructed have been discontinued and replaced by alternatives. I have therefore sought to make use of the nearest possible equivalents to the original scales. This is unfortunate since it renders comparison through time somewhat unreliable. The 2005 scales are constructed from the following items: Left–Right scale: Government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well-off. Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers. Ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation's wealth. There is one law for the rich and one for the poor. Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance Liberty–Authority scale: Young people today do not have enough respect for traditional values. People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences. For some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence. Schools should teach children to obey authority. The law should always be obeyed, even if a particular law is wrong. Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards. For each of these statements, respondents were asked to indicate whether they agreed very strongly, agreed, neither agreed not disagreed, disagreed, or disagreed very strongly. The most left-wing responses to each question comprising the Left–Right scale were coded 1, and the most right-wing responses were coded 5; the most libertarian responses to each question comprising the Liberty–Authority scale were coded 1, and the most authoritarian responses were coded 5. Principal components analysis (using varimax rotation) confirmed two principal factors for 2005, and the individual items loaded onto each of these factors in the way expected (i.e., left–right indicators loaded most strongly onto the first factor, while the Liberty–Authority indicators loaded most strongly onto the second factor). Thus, for 2005 the first factor accounted for 31% of the variance, and the second factor for 24.5% of the variance. Individual items loaded on these factors as follows.illustrationThe general reliability of each of the attitudinal scales is conformed by Cronbach's Alpha coefficients of 0.8811 for the Left–Right scale and 0.7169 for the Liberty–Authority scale.
Note that distance coefficients can be calculated in a number of different ways, and are sometimes referred to as resemblance, similarity or dissimilarity coefficients. Here, the distance between two cases is the sum of the squared differences in values for each variable, given by the formula:
All cluster models were generated by SPSS's ‘Cluster’ program, which measures distances between cases in terms of squared Euclidian distance, and employs the ‘average linkage between groups’ method (as recommended by Leece and Berrington, 1977, 530).
Note that this figure is for the 1997 cross-sectional sample of the British electorate (standard deviation of 0.57, n=2241). Unfortunately, the 2001 and 2005 BES samples do not include the same attitudinal items, so we are unable to update this finding. However, for the entire BRS sample, including all Prospective Parliamentary Candidates who were not elected to Parliament, as well as those who were (n=796), the overall mean on the similarly constructed Liberty–Authority scale is 2.97 (sd=0.69), which tends to confirm that large numbers of people gravitate towards a mean score close to the centre of this scale.
Michael Hill draws on an eclectic mix of sources including internal party group memberships, public statements, Early Day Motions and House of Commons Division Lists to draw a picture of a changing Parliamentary Conservative Party: ‘…the Parliamentary Party became markedly more right-wing after the 1992 general election. The ratio of dries to wets increased as did the ratio of social conservatives to social liberals, while the proportion of Eurosceptic MPs grew by over a quarter, leaving a Europhile rump of just 12 MPs. This trend was confirmed after the 2001 general election when dries, Eurosceptics and social conservatives all grew as a proportion of the Parliamentary Party’ (Hill, 2008, 155). He speculates that this might be attributed to the high number of older MPs that retired in 1997, to be replaced by a new generation of Conservative parliamentarians who were socialised politically during the Thatcher years.
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Webb, P. The Attitudinal Assimilation of Europe by the Conservative Parliamentary Party. Br Polit 3, 427–444 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2008.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2008.24