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:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Dogxit from their Hexit.
How was Lineker’s dramatic set-to with the BBC last weekend likely to have been seen by Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers? We hum the Match Of The Day theme tune as we head down to the Values Lab this week.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the part of the bulletin that’s never afraid to go off script. This week we enjoy a brilliant piece of polling by YouGov on the proportion of Brits who ask guests to use a coaster.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
Lineker-gate and values
Unless you’ve been asleep since the last Weekly arrived in your inbox, you’ll have noticed the enormous media storm around Gary Lineker and the BBC. It began late last week and culminated in a 20-minute truncated version of Match Of The Day screening on Saturday night – without commentary, interviews, pundits or presenters.
The central debate has filled an awful lot of column inches already, and we’ll focus in this Values Lab on a specific element of it: freedom of speech. People may or may not have agreed with Lineker’s original Tweet (which compared the language used to describe Tory government policy to language used in 1930s Germany), but the central point was about his right to say it. Is it more important to permit an individual to express themselves, or to uphold social ‘order’ when people rock the boat?
The two heat maps above are based on a Values Modes question, which asks people to choose between two statements: “It is more important that society is free and open so people can express themselves” and “It is more important that society is well-ordered and regulated, to protect the individual”. As we can see, the heatmap for those leaning towards the former statement is very different to that for those leaning towards the latter. Those who prioritise freedom and openness are Pioneer-leaning; those who support regulation and protection against rogue voices are concentrated among Settlers.
This chimes with what we might expect, looking at the politics of the debate, with the Settler-read Daily Mail siding (uncharacteristically) with the BBC’s decision to discipline Lineker, and the Pioneer-read Guardian publishing a host of pieces backing him. It helped, of course, that Pioneers will mostly have agreed with Gary Lineker about government migration policy. But freedom of speech remains in itself a concept much more likely to animate this segment than their Settler counterparts.
Does this mean that such divisions are helpful from a Tory point of view – shoring up their Settler base, by irritating Pioneers whose votes they have already lost? Not necessarily. The heat maps above do, it’s true, suggest that Settlers’ response to the Lineker Tweet may have been that he should put a sock in it. But there are other forces at play here too. As a mainstream TV presenter and former England football star, Lineker’s socially conservative credentials are also fairly strong (as are those of people like Ian Wright and Alan Shearer) since they appeal to the patriotic tendencies of socially conservative Settlers and the celeb factor loved by socially conservative Prospectors. This is particularly true at a time when support for the Conservatives is very weak.
Settlers are a more loyal group, in political terms, than Pioneers or Prospectors. They vote habitually rather than leaving it late, they have packed in behind the Tories for most of the 2010s. But that does not mean that their support can be taken for granted, and it will be interesting to see if an event like Lineker-gate moves the dial at all.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the bag of Walkers crisps at the bottom of your TCC lunchbox:
Find out the percentage of words spoken by men and women in Oscar-winning films.
