Now that the election’s over, the ballot boxes stowed away again in the basements of town halls across the country, and hundreds of new MPs have taken the train to Westminster to be sworn in, we thought it would be a bit of fun to look at the election results using Audience Spectrum.
Rather than ‘Worcester Woman’, ‘Basildon Man’ or the ‘Just About Managing’, we wondered what the results would looks like through the lens of Audience Spectrum. This would tell us a bit about each party’s supporters and who they are representing when they discuss cultural policy. But it also helps to provide an insight into the segments themselves.
Not familiar with Audience Spectrum, our powerful tool for segmenting UK cultural audiences?
The following diagram shows the proportion of segments in the constituencies won by each party (note that this shows constituents, not voters).
The highest segments by party are:
- Labour: Trips & Treats (14.4%)
- Conservatives: Dormitory Dependables (21.4%)
- Liberal Democrats: Commuterland Culturebuffs (20.5%)
- SNP: Dormitory Dependables (14.1%)
- Plaid Cymru: Home & Heritage (23.5%)
- Reform: Home & Heritage (17.9%)
- Green: Experience Seekers (21.7%)
Beyond the headline figures, a few other things stand out:
- There are five different largest segments across just seven parties: each of them tend to win in areas with different profiles. Where there are similarities, between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, the differing order of the top two segments feels significant (the former, more culturally engaged and in the commuter belts of larger cities, the latter closer to the national average with more mainstream tastes). That both Plaid Cymru and Reform have the same top segment, Home & Heritage – a group that is particularly concentrated in Wales – feel like a precursor of battles between the two parties in the next Senedd elections…
- Labour has the narrowest range between the proportions of segments: with broad appeal across the country in different areas (including London: it is notable how low the proportion of Metroculturals is in seats won by other parties, except the Lib Dems and Greens). Apart from one low outlier (Metroculturals) the SNP has an even more closely-bunched spread.
- Plaid and, especially, Reform have low proportions of all higher-engaged segments among their constituents (the latter seems to have a particularly sharp distinction between segments that are and aren’t in their seats, suggesting that their breakthroughs have been in areas with quite distinctive demographics). Conversely, Greens have all four lower-engaged segments as their four lowest proportions and also had the greatest dominance of one segment (Experience Seekers), perhaps giving an indication of other places where they may turn in the search for future successes.
- Middle-engaged groups dominate seats won by the Conservatives, with three of the top four segments in these areas being middle-engaged. Perhaps the lower proportion of Up Our Street in part reflects the reversion of the Red Wall to Labour.
Another way of looking at these constituency profiles is which segments are most over-represented in each party’s seats. If you’d like to see that perspective, see the article here:
