Three-D Political Segmentation

Electoral Calculus undertook a project to create a political segmentation of the UK voting population by political attitudes. This has become more relevant in recent years since the traditional single left-right axis no longer captures the reality of the public's political attitudes.

In the first stage of the project, respondents were asked a number of political questions to determine every respondent's position on each of three separate political axes:

• Economic axis from left-wing (large state and high taxes) to right-wing (small state and low taxes)
• Nationalism axis from globalist (internationalist, share sovereignty with others) to nationalist (put sovereign Britain first)
• Social axis from socially liberal (permissive, support minority rights) to socially conservative (traditional, value authority, moral majority)

Each respondent can then be plotted on a three-dimensional axis to represent their political position. Groups of similar voters can be formed using segmentation analysis to create seven political 'tribes' of like-minded voters. Full details here. In summary, these tribes are:

Using regression techniques, we also estimated the dominant tribe in each district council ward and each census output area. The example results for London show the diversity of political opinions in the capital.

The tribe analysis was picked up by a number of media outlets, including the Daily Telegraph. Read more about our data services, custom solutions and regression polling.