The Constituency Effect

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Armin Seimel, a Senior Researcher at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

Does living in a poorer constituency increase support for the far right? I argue that poorer constituencies expose voters to more claims that their communities have been left behind, even when they are not poor themselves. I use Britain’s 2024 redrawing of parliamentary constituencies to test this argument. Many voters stayed in the same place but became part of constituencies that were poorer or richer than their previous ones. I calculate deprivation for every old and new constituency using the same local economic data collected before the election, then link these measures to British Election Study panel data. I track the same voters before and after the reform and compare voters from the same former constituency who were assigned to different new ones. Voters assigned to a constituency one standard deviation poorer became about two percentage points more likely to support Reform UK. The shift appeared during the election campaign and survives extensive tests of alternative explanations. The findings show that the geography of political representation, not only personal economic hardship, shapes support for the far right.

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