Dog or cat, big house or small? The things that divide us reflect our political colours
Imagine you had a fixed sum of money to spend on a new house. Other things being equal, would you rather spend it on a small house within walking distance of schools, shops and restaurants, or a large one from which you had to drive everywhere? How you answer is a surprisingly accurate indicator of how you vote.
While you’re pondering your response, take a look at a constituency map of Great Britain. Labour holds a third of the seats in the House of Commons, but you’d never guess that from the minuscule flecks of red. Measured only by land surface area, you’d think Labour was a tiny party, smaller than the Lib Dems and far smaller than the SNP.
The explanation, of course, is that Labour tends to represent compact, densely populated seats. That has been true for a century, but it became much more obvious last week. Labour lost many of its mixed constituencies – those that took in former industrial towns along with rural hinterlands. It held on, however, in big cities.
In Liverpool, for example, Labour took all 14 Westminster seats, including Birkenhead, which was being defended by the incumbent, Frank Field, running as an independent after leaving the party in protest at its handling of anti-Semitism. Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, Newcastle: all remain in Labour hands. Jeremy Corbyn may have led his party to its worst result since 1935, but he held three quarters of the seats in London.
The urban-rural split is such a longestablished feature of our political system that we barely think about it. The same division can be found across the democratic world, with towns leaning Left while the countryside inclines Right. In the United States, for example, there are nearly 3,000 counties of roughly similar geographical size. Some are sparsely populated, others covered in concrete. The former, as a rule, vote Republican, the latter Democrat. In 2008, Barack Obama took just 690 of those nearly 3,000 counties; but, because they were where the population was concentrated, he won with a landslide.
The same divergence exists, to a greater or lesser degree, in Canada, France, Germany, Australia and almost every other wealthy democracy. There was a brief exception in the former Warsaw Pact states during the Nineties, when younger and wealthier urban voters tended to back proWestern parties while the agrarian collectives stuck with the former communists. Nowadays, though, that trend has largely been reversed.
There used to be an obvious explanation. Parties of the Left saw themselves, by and large, as champions of industrialised labour. They were linked to trade unions, and tended to be strongest in areas where there were mines, steel mills and shipyards. Parties of the Right, conversely, tended to be defenders of agriculture.
These days, though, there are few workers left in either category. Some 24,000 people are employed in Britain’s steel sector, and fewer than 2,000 in mining. Even if we count all the family members who pitch in on small farms, there are no more than 200,000 working on the land. By way of comparison, 1.2million work in financial services and 2.9 million in retail.
It is true, of course, that voting is partly hereditary. A pit village might retain a cultural association with Labour after its colliery has closed. But there will eventually come a point when a former mining village is chiefly a village. That seems to be the point we have reached now.
Which brings me back to the opening question. In 2014, a survey by the Pew Research Centre put the choice to Americans: would they prefer a smaller house where they could walk to restaurants and stores, or a larger one where amenities were miles away? By an extraordinary 77 to 21 per cent, those voters defined by Pew as “consistent liberals” preferred the urban apartments, while by an equally staggering 75 to 22 per cent, “consistent conservatives” plumped for the big houses.
That finding is just one of several ways in which people’s voting intentions reflect their personality traits. Psychologists are increasingly interested in the extent to which we can guess people’s political preferences from apparently unrelated characteristics: where they buy their coffee, what they name their children, how much they flinch when shown a shocking image. Conservatives, for example, like bigger cars as well as bigger houses. They are likelier to keep pets than Leftists, likelier to have dogs than cats, and likelier to have big than small dogs.
These findings are a little disquieting. We all like to think that we have come to our conclusions rationally after carefully weighing the facts. But the evidence suggests that very few of us do this. Most people’s political convictions are a product of their intuitions, which are in turn a product of their neural wiring. To a surprising degree, you can predict people’s party preferences from the size of their amygdalas.
There is something especially worrying about the urban/rural divide. As communities self-segregate, people become less likely to fraternise with supporters of other parties.
On the morning after the general election, the BBC asked a young Labour supporter in London why she thought her party had fared so badly. “I don’t know,” she replied, genuinely nonplussed. “Everyone I know voted Labour”.
It is much easier to demonise strangers. We saw it happen during the culture war that followed the 2016 referendum, and we saw it again last week.
Every politician talks of “bringing the country together”, and God knows we need national reconciliation. But neither a successful Brexit nor a moderate Conservative administration will be enough to ensure that. Tribalism is a powerful force. It takes more than peace, prosperity and good government to wear it away.
As communities selfsegregate, people become less likely to fraternise with supporters of other parties