Restructuring the Policy Space in the United Kingdom: The End of the Left-Right Paradigm?

Political scientists often talk about "ideological dimensions" that aggregate related policy issues into a single latent construct. Applying dimension reduction techniques to opinion data generated from two Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) deployed in the United Kingdom in 2014 and 2015, I show how individual issues may be aggregated into two principal dimensions: an economic Left-Right dimension and a communitarian-cosmopolitan dimension. By positioning party supporters on a two-dimensional map defined by these two principal dimensions, I show that United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) supporters are situated very near the "communitarian" pole of the communitarian-cosmopolitan dimension. Finally, I show that the communitarian-cosmopolitan dimension forms a more coherent scale than the Left-Right dimension and this tendency is more marked amongst younger voters and voters with little interest in politics. This would suggest that the notion of (economic) Left and Right is losing its salience in British politics.