Perfect Politicians? Voting Preferences in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Chapter 6 extrapolates to macro-level issues of representation and anti-politics to ask: do voters actually get the ‘wrong’ politicians’? The central argument in this chapter reduces to the existence of an unhealthy premium on the individual in contemporary democratic politics, both in terms of the ways representatives understand and execute their professional function and how/why voters become disillusioned regardless of their political choices. These assumptions are tested with an original conjoint experiment conducted with a representative sample of 1637 British citizens. The results show that personality outweighs other political and socio-economic variables as a voting heuristic in experimental scenarios. Compared with data from 168 MPs, these results also indicate that at the aggregate level there is less of a disjuncture than assumed between the personalities the public want in national politics and the personalities they get.