How the Geographic Clustering of Young and Highly Educated Voters Undermines Redistributive Politics

We analyze support for the welfare state across time and space in Great Britain. Using multilevel regression and post-stratification with historical data and an original survey, we show that a virtually identical majority of people supported those policies in the mid-1990s and in 2020, but patterns of support were very different. Young and highly educated people are now the strongest supporters, as are the youngest and most highly educated geographic areas, mirroring divides over “second-dimension” issues like Brexit. However, young and highly educated voters are clustered in a small number of places, with the Labour Party struggling to win moderately educated and moderately young areas. As a result, the left’s problem in majoritarian systems is not the rise of second-dimension politics per se but rather how its supporters are distributed spatially along that dimension. A majority of voters in favor of welfare and redistribution no longer translates as easily into winning a majority of places in support.