The Wardman Wire

This is a Guest Article by Ordovicius, who writes about anything and everything in Welsh Politics and beyond. I have republished it today, as the links were stripped in the version published yesterday .

Lack of a Welsh Psephology

In the run-up to the Assembly Elections last May, it became quite evident that Welsh politics suffers from a lack of opinion polls, and what surveys there are are far from being tailor-made for Wales, as Alwyn ap Huw pointed out at the time:

UK wide opinion polls are fairly accurate; they are conducted according to a scientific discipline called psephology. Psephologists look at the make up of an electoral community and poll people by selecting respondents who reflect that balance. They try to create a gender balance, age balance, education balance, social class balance, earnings balance etc. that is the same as the balance of the electorate.

Because of a lack of regular opinion polling in Wales there is no such thing as Welsh psephology. Wales is not a microcosm of the UK it is a completely different place, one needs different polling methods in Wales than those used in the UK to get an accurate picture of voting intentions.

So how do Welsh voters vote? Well in Wales the most important factors have been and remain a) location and b) sense of identity.

The ‘Three Wales’ Model of Voting

I have translated a recent article by Richard Wyn Jones, director of Aberystwyth’s Institute of Welsh Politics, published in the Welsh magazine Barn, in which he discusses the ‘Three Wales Model’ created in the 1980s by Denis Balsom. The model is a map of Wales split into three areas: the Welsh speaking ‘Bro Gymraeg’ (The ‘old’ county of Gwynedd, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire) where voters feel a “cultural attachment” to the Welsh language and Nonconformity, and as a result Plaid Cymru is its main party; ‘Welsh Wales’ (West Glamorgan and the Valleys) where voters have a strong Welsh identity but without such a “cultural attachment”, and where Labour dominate the political landscape; and finally ‘British Wales’ (Clwyd, Powys, Gwent and Pembrokeshire) where the voting pattern seems to reflect general British (or rather English) voting patterns.

However, in the second part of his article , Richard Wyn Jones points out that this third section of the Welsh electorate - British Wales - doesn’t quite explain voting patterns in Powys, which has been a Liberal stronghold since the Golden Age of Liberalism. He suggests that the people of Powys -who are ‘natural Conservatives’- vote Liberal because they are in fact too Welsh to vote Tory, as their neighbours in Herefordshire and Shropshire do (or did, prior to 1997). Powys then becomes the key electoral testing ground for Nick Bourne’s strategy of making the Welsh Conservatives more Welsh. Unfortunately, the actions of Wales’ three Tory MPs is set to undermine these efforts.

Localism - comparing Fianna Fail and Plaid Cymru

There is another important element in Welsh voting patterns, and that is localism. In his comparison of Fianna Fail and Plaid Cymru (which I have translated here ), Plaid activist Blogmenai describes the similarity in the nature of the support that these two very different parties have, and it is a similarity that is shared by other Welsh parties: Labour in post-industrial Wales, the Liberals in Powys and the Tories in Monmouthshire:

…there is a definite similarity in the way that the two parties’ supporters see their parties - as local entities which defend local people’s interests against impersonal forces whose source is not local.

And again:

It is seen by most of its supporters as a local party which is essentially an anti-establishment party which defends local interests against the demands of external institutions.

Indeed, there is a striking similarity between Fianna Fail and Welsh Labour: both are the largest parties in their respective countries, both are THE parties of the establishment there, yet for historical reasons and local attitudes, both are still seen as anti-establishment parties.

This is a Guest Article by Ordovicius, who writes about anything and everything in Welsh Politics and beyond.

[tags]ordovicius, transations from welsh, this is sparta, fianna fail, plaid cymru, alwyb ap huw, sanddef rhyferys[/tags]