What if… (revisited)

[ewx]

Political divides in the UK; a document possibly already familiar to many readers, but of renewed relevance.

To my mind it implies that the “LDs give up and join Labour” scenario discussed in my previous posting isn’t quite as unlikely as all that: the graphs on pages 18 and 25 show substantial overlap between Labour and LD supporters on the two main axes they identify.

The other thing I’d forgotten about that survey was the implication that UKIP supporters are disaffected centrist Conservatives. Sadly the script I was using is inaccessibly located on a laptop right now but this evening I shall work out what difference UKIP throwing in their lot with the Conservatives might have made.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Good grief, that author needs a proof-reader. (A spelling checker wouldn't detect "tale"/"tail" or "principle"/"principal", which may be exactly the problem…

I've not finished reading it yet.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

The author is sadly dead.

[gerald_duck]

Oh. Needed a proof-reader, then. /-8

[gerald_duck]

While it's easy to tell if someone's more string-'em-up or more rehabilitation-and-restorative-justice, for example, I can't help wondering where the origins come from on those graphs. There's no obvious (to me) notion of a central point between the two extremes.

I also think, speaking from my own experience, that it's a mistake to characterise euroscepticism — in the sense of opposition to the EU and/or the Euro — as isolationist, anti-immigration, string-'em-up.

Or maybe I'm just a strange person who's out in the least central 1% somewhere.

[songster.livejournal.com]

They don't lump euroscepticism in with isolationism - the UK population does. What the original researchers did was ask a panel of people a bunch of questions about various political issues (e.g. "on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you agree with the following ..." and then do a principal component analysis.

What you find out is that isolationist attitudes, euroscepticism and punitive views on criminals are correlated with each other. If any given person is a eurosceptic, they are more likely to also think that prison sentences should be longer, for example. You yourself may or may not be an exception to that rule, but one data point doesn't disprove the correlation.

I would imagine the origin on their graphs is simply normalised to the population mean score on that particular principal component.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The diagram showing where online respondents are compared to the population at large is a useful warning against inferring too much from one’s acquaintances, too.