The Moving Centre: Preferences for Government Activity in Britain, 1950–2005

Abstract

The political 'centre' is often discussed in debates about public policy and analyses of party strategies and election outcomes. Yet, to date, there has been little effort to estimate the political centre outside the United States. This article outlines a method of estimating the political centre using public opinion data collected for the period between 1950 and 2005. It is demonstrated that it is possible to measure the centre in Britain, that it moves over time, that it shifts in response to government activity and, furthermore, that it has an observable association with general election outcomes.The fundamental driving forces in democracy are the preferences of citizens across a wide range of issues. These preferences, together with other factors, influence the decisions of individual voters. Elections aggregate those individual preferences, however imperfectly, into collective choices. The aggregation of preferences across issues and across individuals, therefore, lies at the very heart of the democratic process.1 And since electoral choices are structured by political parties that tend to compete primarily along a single left-right dimension relating to the scope of government activity, it is just a small step to arguing that these preferences can be summarized by a measure of central tendency such as the 'typical', 'average', 'mean', 'median' or 'political centre'. 2The political centre is a concept of enormous political importance. Political theorists maintain that, if politics is unidimensional, the median voter is the 'Condorcet winner' in the sense that a policy package that suits this individual would defeat all others in a * Department of Government, University of Essex (email: jbartl@essex.ac.uk); School of Politics, University College Dublin; and Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, respectively. The authors would like to thank Hershbinder Mann for collecting much of the early Gallup data. This project was funded by ESRC award number 00-22-2053. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the ECPR General Conference, Pisa, 2007 and the MPSA, Chicago, 2008. The authors also thank James Adams, Judith Bara, Malcolm Brynin, Evelyn Bytzek, Ian Budge, Lawrence Ezrow, Jane Green, Samantha Laycock, Anthony McGann, Hershbinder Mann, Samuel Merrill, Thomas J. Quinn, David Sanders, Elinor Scarbrough, Thomas J. Scotto, Stuart Soroka, Vera Troeger, Hugh Ward, Paul Whiteley and Chris Wlezien for their helpful comments and suggestions, and are particularly grateful to Frances Lynch of the University of Westminster for generously supplying data on average income tax levels.1 Philip E. Converse, 'Popular Representation and the distribution of information', in John A.

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