The New Political Class?
The Changing Socio-Economic Profile of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates and MPs in Britain, 1945-2015
The New Political Class?
The Changing Socio-Economic Profile of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates and MPs in Britain, 1945-2015
Dr Rosie Campbell, Department of Politics, is co-investigator on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project to investigate Britain’s changing political class, with Dr Jennifer vanHeerde-Hudson, UCL.
The Westminster political class is increasingly accused of being ‘out of touch’ and unable to understand the lives and concerns of ‘ordinary’ British people. Recent research has shown that politicians are increasingly drawn from a narrowing middle class—a privileged class—despite significant efforts at increasing the descriptive representation of elected representatives so that they reflect their constituencies more closely.
The project will consider three questions:
- How has the socio-economic profile of prospective parliamentary candidates and MPs changed overtime?
- Do social/electoral attributes influence selection?
- Is there a relationship between social/electoral attributes and career trajectory?
Dr Campbell and Dr Van Heerde-Hudson will create a single, comprehensive, publicly available dataset combining biographical, social, electoral and institutional attributes for Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPC) and MPs from 1945-2015 – the first, systematic and comprehensive source of data on parliamentary candidates in the UK. In addition to providing a rich source of data for the project, the dataset will be of interest to academics working in the area of parties, campaigns and elections, across other disciplines, and to stakeholders outside of academia, including political parties and various media outlets.