It's the Culture, Stupid! New Labour's Progressive Consensus

For New Labour to achieve the 'progressive consensus' to which it aspires, it needs to develop a transformative, cultural politics. This would engage in a battle of hearts and minds with the electorate, seeking to shape its preferences rather than accommodating them. Much of the accumulated criticism of New Labour focuses on its failure to develop an overarching political narrative to fulfil this task. However, critics have also shown that New Labour does have a definite vision of the type of society and individual it is constructing in the face of social change. Unfortunately for progressives, this is based on an image of the acquisitive individual, culturally conservative community and a fatalistic understanding of modernisation. Entrenching a progressive consensus requires a political strategy that resonates with contemporary experiences of social change, while showing how it can be steered in more progressive directions.     

The dynamics of issue competence and vote for parties in and out of power: An analysis of valence in Britain, 1979–1997

This article develops the reward‐punishment issue model of voting using a newly collated aggregate measure of issue competence in Britain between 1971 and 1997, revealing systematic differences between governing and opposition parties in the way citizens' evaluations of party competence are related to vote intention. Using monthly Gallup ‘best party to handle the most important problem’ and vote intention data, time series Granger‐causation tests give support to a classic issue reward‐punishment model for incumbents. However, for opposition parties this reward‐punishment model does not hold: macro‐issue competence evaluations are Granger‐caused by changes in vote choice or governing party competence. An explanation is offered based upon the differentiating role of policy performance and informational asymmetries, and the implications are considered for comparative studies of voting, public opinion and for political party competition.