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The Moving Centre: Preferences for Government Activity in Britain, 1950–2005

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2010

John Bartle ,
Sebastian Dellepiane-Avellaneda  and
James Stimson
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Abstract

The political ‘centre’ is often discussed in debates about public policy and analyses of party strategies and election outcomes. Yet, to date, there has been little effort to estimate the political centre outside the United States. This article outlines a method of estimating the political centre using public opinion data collected for the period between 1950 and 2005. It is demonstrated that it is possible to measure the centre in Britain, that it moves over time, that it shifts in response to government activity and, furthermore, that it has an observable association with general election outcomes.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 259 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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22 Further questions and administrations have been added to the dataset. As of 28 March 2007, it contained 481 questions. This database, together with the estimated preferences for government activity, will be deposited with the Data Archive at the University of Essex.

23 It has been suggested by some reviewers that the meaning of the ‘middle’ or supposed ‘neutral’ response might vary over time and that this might cast some doubt on our coding case. The classic case that such reviewers would seem to have in mind would be the ‘keep things as they are’ response option that is available to respondents on various tax and spending questions. When a right-wing party is in power, for example, it might be supposed that those who select this option might be revealing conservative attitudes towards change. This might well be the case for some questions and some respondents. It may well be that we could improve our estimates were we able to incorporate such refinements. Identifying the sort of questions for which this might be a problem would however be subjective and identifying the time at which the meaning of the neutral category changes would inject a degree of subjectivity. In any event, our method relies on covariation across a range of items, many of which do not conceivably suffer from this problem. For the moment – just as with the European preference series – we prefer to maintain a degree of consistency and focus on those responses that clearly take ‘sides’.

24 This excludes very few questions. British pollsters and political scientists have focused largely on domestic affairs in their questionnaires.

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28 In some cases, the inclusion of the phrase ‘the government’ causes problems because it is not always clear whether the question will be interpreted as meaning the present government or government in general. We have included such questions in those cases where it seems to refer to government in general.

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36 That depends, as always, on the degree to which each series is a valid indicator of the concept in question, here left–right public opinion. This is a matter for which the empirical results will be informative.

37 One might think that the problem is easily solved, that the mean of a series can serve as an expected value. But this is an infinite regress problem. Without either the full series or a random sample of it, we have no valid estimate of that mean.

38 The extraction algorithm can also be used to estimate a second dimension. This accounts for far less of the variation in the longitudinal variation and is more difficult to interpret. It does not, however, appear to represent the sort of liberal–authoritarian dimension or ‘tough v. tender’ dimension of the sort anticipated in the textbooks. We explore the issue of dimensionality further in Bartle, John, Dellepiane, Sebastian and Stimson, James A., ‘The Dimensionality of British Political Preferences, 1950–2005’ (paper presented at the 5th ECPR General Conference, Potsdam, 2009 – available from the authors)Google Scholar.

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44 The dyad ratios algorithm has no analytic solution for standard errors of the annual estimates. We proceed instead by bootstrapping. We first introduce variation by re-sampling our raw data. Instead of the fixed percentage reported by a survey organization, ρ, we take a draw for each (non-missing) item and year from a distribution which is normal with mean ρ and a standard deviation given by the sampling error of ρ, σ = √[ρ(100 − ρ)/N]. This allows us to repeat the estimation of the latent series as many times as we wish, each sampling slightly different data and returning different results. The standard deviations for each period of all those independent replications, 1,000 in the case at hand, become the standard error estimates that we report. We have not yet been able to establish why the errors are larger towards the end of the series.

45 Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat’.

46 The full factor loadings for the 349 items are available from the authors on request.

47 The earlier British Election Studies also asked about the reported left–right position, but the filter question generated so much missing data that the resulting marginals were not included in our database.

48 The latter, it should be remembered, is not included in the former.

49 Some indication that this is the case is provided by a simple regression of current preferences and current self-reported left–right position on the same indicators lagged one year. In the model of self-reported positions, lagged self-reported left–right positions and lagged policy preferences are correctly signed and statistically significant. In the model of current preferences, both lagged preferences and lagged self-reported left–right positions are significant, but the latter is incorrectly signed, suggesting that if they were rising one year ago, preferences fall. Self-reported left–right positions: Constant = −3.23 (2.95)*, Lagged preferences = 0.82 (0.08), Lagged self-reported positions = 0.26 (0.06), Adjusted R 2 = 0.93, N = 31; Public preferences: Constant = 3.73* (2.47), Lagged preferences = 1.09 (0.07), Lagged self-reported positions = −0.16 (0.05), Adjusted R 2 = 0.93, N = 31 (*Not significant at p < 0.05, two-tailed).

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53 Since Britain has three major parties, not two, we see the Liberal Democrats complicating the picture by sometimes falling between the other two parties and sometimes emphasizing different issues. We ignore the complication.

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57 A Dickey–Fuller test indicates the presence of a unit root in the preferences series. So, henceforth, we will work with first differences in the series or analogously employ an error correction formulation which is appropriate for integrated time series.

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63 Short-term relationships between Δx and Δy may also be observed, but are relatively uncommon with unit root dependent series.

64 We were unable to find a single measure of government expenditure as a proportion of GDP for the whole period 1950–2005. Therefore, we collected a series of overlapping indicators from a variety of sources and used the extraction algorithm to estimate a single series. The longest single-source period was found in White, G. and Chapman, H., ‘Long-term Trends in Public Expenditure’, Economic Trends, 408 (1987), pp. 124–128Google Scholar; but we also used HM Treasury, OECD and Eurostat. These resulting series explained: 86.85 per cent of the variation in the data had a mean of 39.64 and a standard deviation of 3.42. The complete original dataset, together with the extraction output, is available from the authors on request.

65 The measure of average income tax is based on analyses carried out by Frances Lynch and her colleagues at the University of Westminster. It measures average income tax levels for specified ‘typical’ individuals (see Johnson, Paul, Lynch, Frances and Geoffrey Walker, John, ‘Income Tax and Elections in Britain, 1950–2001’, Electoral Studies, 24 (2005), 393–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar). One of the most striking features of debates about tax in Britain is the extent to which debate resolves around income tax, even though it generates a relatively small proportion of government revenue. We have been provided with the data for male single industrial workers only. It is clear from Figure 2 in Johnson et al., ‘Income Tax and Elections in Britain’, that this correlates very well with average tax levels for married industrial workers too. These estimates are available only up to 2001, with the consequence that N falls to 51.

66 We have two alternative paths by which preferences might be related to levels of government spending and taxing. In one, preferences at earlier times affected election results and altered the control of government. So current spending may be a positive function of preferences at various lags. The thermostatic hypothesis introduces a different path. Current electorates react to the current and previous size of government mix negatively. As government grows, they move to the right in response. As it declines, they move to the left. So when we observe a statistical connection between them, are we observing a web of endogeneity or can the two be sorted out? They differ in two important respects, which is helpful to sorting out causality claims. In timing, the logic requires the first path to associate changes in government only with lagged values of preferences. It is previous elections that put the current government in power. The thermostatic effect is the reverse; the electorate cannot react to changes in government until those changes have occurred, and therefore current preferences should reflect only previous policy. The second difference is the important matter of sign. One relationship, preferences → elections → policy, is positive; the other, policy → (−) preferences, is negative. Thus, the data can help sort out alternative interpretations. The sign and time order that we observe supports only the second, thermostatic, interpretation. We cannot rule out that the first path might exist. But if it does, it is too weak to leave behind evidence.

67 Ivor Crewe, ‘Now relax, it's a dead cert’, New Statesman, 12 February 2001. See also King, Anthony, ‘Why Labour Won – At Last’, in Anthony King, ed., New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls, 1997 (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1998), pp. 177–207Google Scholar.

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82 Erikson et al., The Macro Polity, p. 5.

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