Our political parties are in disarray as they struggle to make sense of divides among elected representatives, members and voters which do not sit neatly along old left-right party lines. Voting behaviour is increasingly volatile as voters struggle to put their cross in a single box which represents their complex sets of values. Making sense of these cross-cutting divides is essential for understanding what is going on in politics in the UK and elsewhere in Europe and beyond.

Understanding values clusters allows us to grasp the complexity beneath the surface of political behaviour. Exactly how clusters of values become salient and are packaged and activated by elites is critical to understanding how the political party system fragments and how it could realign.

New research by Michael Turner and his team at BMG research has revealed 10 ‘clans’ based on the value positions of the electorate. Value positions are more enduring than policy preferences or evaluations, are often deeply held and are our conceptions of the kind of society we would like to live in. Value positions are expressions of the desirable not reflections on precise policy formulations. Of the 10 clans identified in the research three hold traditional ‘left-wing’ positions on economic matters. These are the ‘Global Green Community’, ‘Common Sense Solidarity’ and ‘Proud and Patriotic State’ clans (and they align closely with groups I have written about as ‘Left-liberals’, ‘Left-centre’ and ‘Left-authoritarians’).

Global Green Community (GGC) clan members combine an array of socialist views on the economy with liberal and environmentalist stances on social issues.

Common-Sense Solidarity (CSS) clan members are very strong supporters of renationalisation, trade unions and the redistribution of wealth via taxation. They are comfortable with immigration and have mixed views on social issues such as human rights and parenting.

Proud and Patriotic State (PPS) clan members tend to be in favour of redistribution of wealth and nationalisation of key industries but with a strong opposition to multiculturalism and immigration.

Taken together these clans account for just over 1 in 3 members of the electorate. Within this group PPS is the largest clan, in fact at 15% of the electorate this is the largest of the 10 clans identified in the research. While the ‘Global Green Community’ (GGC) is the smallest of these three clans, accounting for 1 in 10 of the electorate.

These clans vary in ways that are critical to understanding their political behaviour. The GGC are a highly educated and politically interested group, the most politically interested of all the clans. Over forty per cent of those in the ‘Global Green Community’ clan are very interested in politics, compared with less than a quarter of the ‘Common Sense Solidarity’ clan and just twelve per cent of the ‘Proud and Patriotic State’ group. Among the later, a greater proportion have ‘no’ interest in politics than are very interested in it. This matters; it tells us which ‘left-wing’ voices are heard the loudest in political discourse, particularly outside of an election campaign when only those with a degree of interest in politics are paying attention to the political dramas unfolding in Westminster and actively engaging in public debate. It can lead to a very skewed perception of the concerns of voters across the political spectrum.

Each of these three clans have broadly speaking ‘socialist’ values but their voting behaviour at the last two general elections has been very different.

At the 2015 General Election, which seems in political terms much longer ago than the three and half years that have elapsed, Labour (under Ed Miliband) were already capturing a substantial majority of the GGC vote. They also had a narrow majority of the CSS voters. However, even in 2015 (before Brexit and Corbyn) there were divides between the groups; among the PPS clan the Conservatives had a slight lead, while 1 in 5 of this clan voted for UKIP. This divide is even more embedded in voting behaviour in 2017. The smaller party votes are all squeezed to below 10% of any clan but the differences between the GGC, CSS and PPS groups becomes much larger as the majority of UKIP support in the PPS group moves to the Conservatives. While in both the GGC and CSS groups the Labour vote share increases at the expense of the LibDems and Greens.

In 2017 the GGC are even more solidly behind Labour than they were in 2015, with more than 4 in 5 of the clan who voted voting Labour. The previously narrow majority for Labour among the CSS clan is more definitive with almost 7 in 10 now supporting Labour while the Labour share among the PPS clan barely increases at all and the Conservatives win a (very) narrow majority of the votes in this clan.

To reiterate, this is not a divide between those in favour of ‘Corbynomics’ and those in step with Conservative views on austerity and private ownership. All these groups are in broad agreement with the central pillars of Labour party economic policy. What distinguishes them is not whether they wish to see the railways nationalised, the wealthy taxed or trade unions given more powers. The key divide here is on social issues such as attitudes to immigration, multiculturalism and criminal justice. These issues were also key to understanding preferences in the 2016 EU Referendum and as a result are reflected in the EU votes of these clans. An astonishing 91% of the GGC clan who voted in the referendum voted to remain in the EU; among the CSS clan this was also higher than average at 69% but among the PPS group just 16% voted remain. While these ‘left-wing’ clans were divided by these issues well before the 2016 vote, this divide has been thrown into sharp relief in the 18 months since the referendum.

The model underpinning the clans draws on a wide range of values to generate the groupings. These can be represented by ‘spider’ diagrams, which allow for visual comparisons of the clans across these values.

The GGC spider diagram has all the values close to the centre of the ‘web’ indicating the most ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ positions on each cluster of values.

Comparing the GCC spider diagram with the CSS diagram above we can see that this group are markedly less ‘liberal’ on issues of ‘Discipline and Respect’, ‘Gender and Sexuality’ and ‘Religion, Tradition and the Monarchy’. Scores close zero here indicate ‘central’ positions on these dimensions and so while much less liberal than GGC they are by no means ‘illiberal’ on these issues. On ‘The Economy and Taxation’ and ‘Welfare’ this group have values close to the centre of the ‘web’ indicating strong ‘left’ positions, very similar to those held by the GGC clan.

The PPS group share only one key dimension with the GGC on ‘The economy and taxation’; on this bundle of issues (as indicated at the start) this group are ‘left’ leaning. Elsewhere in the web of values their positions are much further out and indicate quite illiberal positions on ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘Immigration, Patriotism and Multiculturalism’, ‘Discipline and Respect’ and ‘International Affairs’. It is also worth nothing here that this group is not ‘left’ leaning in their values around welfare.

It is difficult to see how these very different value clusters can be satisfied by the same set of specific policies from a single political party. It also highlights the ‘myth’ of the centre. Value positions are complex and groups that may occupy the centre ground in one cluster are unlikely to do so on others. The key line of agreement between them is on the economy and it would seem likely that continued emphasis on the economic is a way to bring these ‘left-wing’ clans together. But we are increasingly in a world where it is not (only) ‘the economy, stupid!’. On virtually all other value dimensions the largest of these groups, PPS, is very much less ‘liberal’ than the other two. This poses a continuing problem for parties of the left who need the votes of this group to win power but who find it difficult to speak to any of their other concerns. Moreover, even where the political will exists to reach out to those such as the PPS clan, there is a danger that in so doing the appeal to those with liberal values (particularly in the GGC) is diminished with other parties waiting in the wings.

More information about the clans and a ‘tool’ for finding your values clan can be found here.