The British Labour Party and leadership election mandate(s) of Jeremy Corbyn: patterns of opinion and opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party

This paper offers the first systematic evaluation of opinion within the 2015–2017 parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) towards the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. We do this by identifying whether individual parliamentarians remained supportive of Corbyn as their party leader or not, and then relating opinion on this to a series of variables that form the basis of a unique data set on the PLP. By constructing this data set we are able to test, via logistic regression analysis, a series of hypotheses based around (1) demographic variables – i.e. age, gender and trade union membership; (2) political variables – i.e. year of entry, constituency region, marginality, main competition and the endorsement of their constituency Labour Party (CLP) in the leadership election of 2016 and (3) ideological variables – i.e. views on continued European Union [EU] membership, immigration, intervention in Syria and the renewal of Trident.