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 the Values Lab, at the rise of post-materialism. Could this scupper the Tories for good?
And of course, there’s the post-materialist odyssey that is Charlie’s Attic. This week’s Attic is a Glastonbury special, including tips on how to find your tent and a 1992 documentary about the festival.
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.
Millennial Values
A recent article for Unherd by Chris Clarke, the Godfather of TCC Weekly, looked at the long-term prospects for the Tories. It argued that their problem with Millennials was not just a case of the Conservatives not serving the economic interests of this group. It was due to the growth, in developed nations, of post-material values.
Post-materialists are essentially Pioneers – a values set which is growing over time. The article argues that by going to war with this values group the Tories have essentially built in their own obsolescence.
Chris’s case is backed up by an analysis we did a few years ago, after the 2017 election. It found that Labour’s appeal had coalesced around the Pioneer corner of the map between 2005-2017 (see above). The Conservative vote, meanwhile, had concentrated in Settler territory. (The Prospector grouping were, as we wrote a little while ago, sidelined by this process).
Brexit was clearly part of this, increasing the divide. And differences will surely have polarised further with the wranglings over the terms of departure since 2017. But, as the maps show, the split set in before the EU Referendum.
This state of affairs initially helped the Tories. The geographical distribution of Pioneers meant that Labour’s vote became increasingly ‘inefficient’, piling up in cities. Settlers, by contrast, were spread in a more useful way, from a Conservative perspective.
Much of the 2010s was, as a result, defined by debates about how Labour could change this, and reach beyond their Pioneer core. But with the Pioneer populous growing over time and moving away from cities – and with Labour doing better among non-Pioneers – we wonder if the next decade of politics will be characterised differently: by a Tory struggle to reach beyond their Settler base.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic is reimagined as Charlie’s Field, with a Glastonbury themed bulletin:
