The Professor Will See You Now: Who Voters Don't Like

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read5 hr

In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: voter preferences

Fellow lecturer to me, after a Question Time-style event: “What did you think of that?”

Me: “It was all right, but didn’t that dreadful woman remind you why you don’t vote Lib Dem?”

Him: “That’s my wife.”

It may have been years ago, but the embarrassment still lingers. It came flooding back to me recently while reading some of the excellent new research which has started to be published on the 2024 general election.

We often focus on which parties voters want to vote for; yet the more you read about the 2024 contest, the more it becomes clear that as the party system fragments – the Lab/Con combined vote share last year was the lowest since Labour emerged as a significant party in 1918 – we also need to focus much more on who they don’t like and who they won’t vote for.

While many voters will vote tactically, most still do not. Plus, many misperceive the tactical situation in their seat

Take, for example, the extent to which supporters of different parties voted, depending on what they perceived as the tactical situation in their constituency. As a fascinating new paper, just published in Political Quarterly makes clear, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters voted in very different ways, depending on what was going on locally – and in such a way as to most hurt the Conservatives.

In constituencies in which they believed the top two parties to be Labour and the Conservatives, those voters who preferred Labour were almost certain to indeed vote Labour; but of those who would have preferred the Liberal Democrats, under half voted for their actual preferred party. In seats where it was the Liberal Democrats who were duking it out with the Tories, the proportions were almost exactly reversed: those who liked the Lib Dems voted Lib Dem, but barely just over half of those who would have preferred Labour stuck with their preferred party.

But while many supporters of parties of the left responded to the tactical situation in their constituency, voters on the right mostly did not. As the authors write: “Reform voters were no more likely to vote Conservative if they thought Labour could win a constituency or if they thought the Liberal Democrats would win a constituency.”

The research is good on why these effects were not even more significant. While many voters will vote tactically, most still do not. Plus, many misperceive the tactical situation in their seat. People were much less likely to think they were in Lab/Con contests than they actually were – and much more likely to think they were in Lab/Lib Dem fights than in reality.

This is one of the reasons why Labour could move from catastrophic defeat to glorious landslide despite an increase in vote share of just one percentage point. Yet it’s possible to see multiple ways in which these factors could play out differently next time. What if, now that one of them is in government, the voters on the left stop being so obliging? What if voters on the right start to?

I have slight qualms about the question asked to determine preferences, which is whether you “like” the party concerned. We all have a friend who we like very much, but who we would not trust to look after our house or kids.

But still, one stat buried in the appendices should worry Conservatives. When voters were asked which party they most liked, the Conservatives were not in the top two. Indeed, they were not even in the top three. In terms of which parties voters said they liked at the last election, Labour may have topped the poll, but Reform and the Greens came second and third respectively, with the Lib Dems fifth. The Conservatives were fourth.

Further reading: M Miori and J Green, The Most Disproportionate UK Election: How the Labour Party Doubled its Seat Share with a 1.6-Point Increase in Vote Share in 2024, The Political Quarterly (2025)