The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
This week we look, in our politics section, at ethnicity and electoral data. We ask how decision-makers can keep up with the pace of demographic change.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, where everything is different but nothing ever changes. This week’s attic includes a Twitter thread on the 1970s Yoghurt Wars.
An excellent Sky News infographic this week looked at the voting behaviours of voters who are not white British. With commentary from the academic Will Jennings, the analysis finds that “there is less data about people from ethnically diverse backgrounds than any other section of the electorate.” As it points out, “The last full-scale academic study is more than a decade old. Three general elections and an EU referendum have happened since then.”
The chart below, which shows the attitudes to social liberalism of different BME groups, is just one of many excellent visualisations in the piece.
Our partners at Webber Phillips have thought about this subject more than most. Their name recognition tool, Origins, presents a live and granular picture of how society is changing – allowing users to look in detail at the outcomes and distributions of sub-groups, be it those of Somali, Lithuanian, or Mandarin heritage. Their report from 2020 looked at the electoral implications of rising diversity on ‘Red Wall’ seats.
Webber Phillips point out the limitations of broad categories like ‘white other’, and critique the reliance on self-identification as the only method of getting ethnicity data. In one study, from earlier this year, they found that non-White British patients at an NHS Trust were twice as likely as their white counterparts to be in categories such as ‘other’, ‘unknown’ or ‘not stated’.
This draws into question wider issues around the definitions we currently use. Given that some of the fastest growing migrant groups are white minorities from Eastern Europe, are terms such as BME reductive?
As the original Sky News analysis points out, the 2021 census is likely to reveal a significantly more diverse population in the UK than a decade ago. This continues to throw up tough questions for those seeking to analyse politics and society.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, where tough questions an easy answers are united each Friday:
