Alex Davenport

This thread is mostly terrible for the Tories but honestly, 37% and a clear lead on “can deal with Britain’s economic problems” for the 2026 Conservative Party is just astonishing testament to the stickiness of people’s deepest assumptions about longstanding political parties

Thanks so much Nina, congratulations to you too on the defence!

Thanks so much for everything Arnout, truly.

Indeed - will be interesting to see if D66 can maintain positive valence through the challenges of a minority government!

Many thanks, Roi! And couldn't agree more - I drew on these articles a great deal when writing the book!

The first chapter of the book is currently free to read at the following link academic.oup.com/book/62000/c.... For those who do not have access to the rest of the book, please feel free to drop me an email at alexander.davenport@soc.cas.cz and I'd be delighted to share more!

However, the potential remains for these voters to increasingly support social liberals, both through generational replacement, and where conservative and social democratic parties take up positions which clearly diverge from these voters' preferences (e.g. to compete with the radical right).

Secondly, many of these 'market cosmopolitan' voters already have strong partisan ties to other parties, mainly conservatives & social democrats, which likely pre-date their current ideological positions and cannot be easily shaken. Consequently, they have little interest in switching parties.

As I argue, this under-performance can be primarily explained by 2 factors: firstly, social liberals' negative 'valence' (non-ideological) reputations, given most parties lack recent experience leading governments, and have a propensity to carry the can for unpopular policies in coalition.

A series of bar graphs, showing the vote shares won by the different party families in Western Europe, compared with each family's 'expected' vote shares if they were to win the support of all voters I identify as the most ideologically compatible options. Social liberal parties' expected vote shares are above 25%, indicating that they are a better ideological fit for more voters than any other party family, but their actual vote share barely exceed 10 percent. For most other party families, the actual and expected vote shares are largely similar, though radical right parties' actual vote shares are considerably higher than the expected vote shares.

Combining data on voter and party ideology shows that social liberal parties - i.e. those that hold these pro-market, cosmopolitan positions - are the closest ideological fit for around a quarter of all WE voters ('expected vote share'), but win the support of far fewer voters in practice.

The book examines why liberal parties have not been more successful despite being the only parties to combine economically pro-market and culturally cosmopolitan/progressive policy positions, which are shared by a growing share of contemporary electorates.

A book cover, featuring an image of an incomplete bridge, bearing the title 'The Unfulfilled Electoral Potential of West European Liberal Parties', and the author's name, 'Alexander Davenport'.

Excited to announce that my new book, 'The Unfulfilled Electoral Potential of West European Liberal Parties', is available in both online and print formats with Oxford University Press as of today! academic.oup.com/book/62000 Below is a brief summary of the arguments:

Sorry, but the guy who has survived longer an achieved more of his priorities than anyone else in politics over the past two decades, who has outmaneuvered multiple leaders of two larger parties and reoriented politics around his priorities is not “bad at politics”. This is cope.

Studying politically-oriented subjects such as arts, humanities and social sciences is associated with democratic citizenship; education appears to encourage democratic support and engagement through the cognitive benefits it confers www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Currently visiting the US, and can confirm all the bell boys are asking about the Tavistock gender clinic