Values and the electorate: understanding where the voters are Paula Surridge has been producing some of the most interesting work on the role of values in modern British politics. Here she writes for Liberal Democrat Newswire on where a Lib Dem core vote might be located. Voters have become more volatile as strong partisan attachments have declined over the course of the late 20th and early 21st century. Key to understanding this volatility are the values that voters hold. Values are deeply held views of the kind of society we want to be part of, and how would we like the world to be? These are increasingly becoming a new lens through which politics is refracted as old heuristics of parties (and leaders) weaken. It is useful in the context of political behaviour to think of these values as having two distinct dimensions, an economic dimension (concerned with economic justice, equality and organisation) and a social dimension (concerned with social justice, tolerance and authority). We are very used to thinking of British politics as being primarily organised around the first of these dimensions, but the social dimension was a far more important element in the vote to leave the European Union and has long been important for distinguishing Liberal Democrat voters. The positions of the British electorate on these dimensions has been relatively stable over the last 25 years, though with small changes towards more liberal values (reflecting the higher average education levels of voters over time). In terms of the left-right set of values, Liberal Democrat voters have generally be positioned between Conservative and Labour voters (though closer to Labour voters and at the 2001 and 2005 election indistinguishable from Labour voters on these issues). However, on the social (or liberal) dimension, Liberal Democrat voters (as we would expect) have consistently been the most liberal group of party supporters. The two sets of values are largely uncorrelated among the electorate. In other words, knowing someone’s values on the traditional economic dimension is not very helpful for predicting their values on the social (liberal) dimension. But different combinations of them produce very different value sets. By taking each of the value scales and creating three sections within it is possible to create a matrix which has nine positions in it.