“Traditional British values” in political science

Yesterday, one of those reports was released purporting to reveal some things about British political attitudes. The take-home was that the public were closer to Labour than the Tories on the economic dimension but that things were reversed when it came to social attitudes, with voters being more authoritarian and traditional than their representatives and more closely aligned with the Tories. This, coupled with the claim that the social values dimension is gaining in importance compared to the economic one, looms large in some “political science” explanations of Brexit and Tory success.

Looking at the report, I noticed an odd thing: one of the questions was about “traditional British values” and whether respondents thought young people should respect them more. I imagined, naively that there must be a list somewhere of what these values are, given that they are purportedly what voters have opinions about. But no. Respondents are expected to interpret the question for themselves, so if a person thinks Britain is traditionally open and tolerant and thinks this has gone into reverse in recent years and says “yes”, their response will nevertheless count as a score for authoritarianism. I don’t know how likely my hypothetical case is, but it is at least possible, particularly, perhaps, from a disappointed immigrant who had been sold on a particular image of Britain.

There is, by the way, an official list of British values. It occurs in the case of the British goverment’s “Prevent” strategy, which is supposed to combat extremism. According to that policy, the British values are “democracy”, “the rule of law”, “individual liberty and mutual respect”, and “Tolerance of different faith and beliefs”. If you run an educational establishment, you have specific duties to encourage these. (A nursery for under-5s I’m acquainted with had a little official explainer on the wall, telling its charges that the “rule of law” is about “following the rules”.) I suppose, hypothetically, that a respondent with these values in mind, and thinking of the Brexiteer and Johnson record on them – plans for voter suppression, illegal prorogation of Parliament, frequent abuse of executive power in immigration, racist and Islamophobic diatribes by the man at the top – might regret their demise and say “yes” but be coded as “authoritarian”. Perhaps not so likely, I admit.

Chris Hanretty (@chrishanretty) tells me on twitter that this same set of questions has been in use in British politics since the early 1990s. Researchers back then, allowing respondents to interpret the question however they chose, found, neverthless that it was useful in positioning those same respondents on a libertarian-authoritarian axis. Still, there is something a bit fishy here. Responses to a question that has no determinate meaning are found to corellate with some quantum that isn’t itself independently observable but which the model postulates is “out there” on the basis of responses to this and other questions. So the responses are, supposedly, what one would expect, given other features of the model: coherence, in other words. But there’s obviously going to an inductive problem here: just because such a good fit between responses and presumed attitudes was observed when the model was originally devised in the early 90s, why do political scientists believe that correlation continues to exist in the vastly changed political and social environment of the 2010s?

There’s a reason why this problem of induction isn’t going to get pressed too hard within this kind of social science though. It is because sticking to the same questions, and implicitly the same model, is seen as a feature, not a bug. It is because sticking to the same questions generates a set of answers that can be compared to the answers reported in all the previous surveys. But unfortunately this can only be reliable if the questions have a consistent meaning for respondents over time. It isn’t hard to see that this often won’t be so. Years ago, when I sat on a committee looking at research proposals (details changed to protect etc etc …) we were looking at a project that proposed to ask teenagers about drug use. Having teenagers myself at the time, I could see that many of the questions would be incomprehensible or misleading to them. I queried this, only to be met with the answer that the psychologists had to stick to the same questions, because their predecessors had been asking the questions since 1959 and they needed to be able to compare …. See the problem?

One suggestion I heard on twitter was that the “British values” question tracks attitudes to authority and hierarchy. Those answering yes might be presumed to be more deferential. Well perhaps. But there’s another question in the “economic values” section, which seems not entirely unrelated, but which serves only to position people on that orthogonal “economic” scale. It asks whether there’s one law for the rich and another for the poor. Are people who think that society is a racket for the benefit of the toffs but who also think that traditional British values should be respected more by the young really best thought of as deferential to those above them? Maybe at least some of those who think it is a scam want a return to better standards in public life and say “yes” to British values for that reason? But people are complicated, and sometimes hypocritical, aren’t they?