If you’ve been tracking the shifting battle lines in political rhetoric you may have noticed the opening of a new front in the past year or so. After a revival of the old tribalisms of left and right that seemed to be fading at the end of the last century, there’s now renewed fighting over the middle.

In many ways this is a predictable trend. As the left vs. right arguments became ever more polarised, meme-ified and vitriolic it became more attractive to identify as neither. The response to the response is then for the extremes to attempt to convince the middle to pick a side by attacking their chosen identity as fence-sitters, passive enablers of the opposition or worse.

Meanwhile, in Brexiting UK, the disagreements are generating talk of major parties splitting and ideas are being floated of new parties that might capture an unrepresented centre. All in all it seems a good time to look into some data on these left-centre-right identities.

To get a better view of things I stepped away from Twitter feeds and Reddit and had a dig through the results from the British Election Study — which is a multi-wave survey project “managed by a consortium of the University of Manchester, The University of Oxford, and The University of Nottingham”.

How Many Centrists Are There?

Ironically, this conversation about centrists comes in a period where I’m sure I’m not the only person who has wondered if the middle even much exists any more. Based on social media volume you could easily come to the conclusion that moderates were a dying breed.

The survey numbers paint a rather different picture. Here’s the self-identified left-right positioning from the most recent survey wave (conducted between 4th May 2018 and 21st May 2018) with demographic weightings applied.