Academic conferences – even ones about politics – rarely make the news. This week’s annual conference of UK political scientists at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow talked about many interesting topics, including the link between football and populism in Southern Europe and the role that comedy plays in the formation of Scottish identity. But such presentations rarely trouble the Twittersphere, let alone the front page of the newspapers.
In my own case, I was talking about whether the next UK general election will be dominated by voters’ views on what political scientists call ‘valence’ issues, that is, things like the economy and the NHS where there is largely consensus on what we would like to happen (that is, more growth and shorter waiting lists). If that were to be the case, that would represent a striking contrast with the last election in 2019, when voters’ attitudes towards a ‘position’ issue, that is, Brexit (where people disagreed on whether they wanted to be inside or outside the EU) largely determined how people voted.
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