Mae'r cynnwys hwn ar gael yn Saesneg yn unig.
A new paper in Electoral Studies by Ralph Scott at the University of Bristol and Melanie Jones at Cardiff University investigates the influence of disability on party political preferences.
While there is an emerging evidence base on the effect of disability on voter turnout (including a recent paper authored by Melanie and Samuel Brown), the role of disability – defined as long-term, activity-limiting health conditions aligned to the 2010 UK Equality Act – on other political attitudes and behaviour is still relatively unexplored.
In our paper we address this gap, using nationally representative data on 51,597 respondents to Understanding Society to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between disability and party support.
We find that, after accounting for demographic characteristics, disabled people are less likely to support parties to the political right and more likely to support protest parties.
This in line with our expectations, formed based on existing evidence showing that disabled people have policy preferences more in line with parties of the left (higher public spending, particularly on healthcare) but also are more likely to reject the mainstream and support protest movements.
In relative terms, after accounting for compositional effects (age, sex, region and ethnicity), the disability gap is slightly larger for support for protest parties (46.9%) than the political right (30.1%), highlighting the importance of considering party support beyond the traditional left-right axis and potentially a concerning reflection of disabled people’s dissatisfaction with traditional political options.
Interestingly, this is not predominantly a reflection of differences in economic resources – we account for the influence of employment status, educational qualifications and personal income – and instead suggests that disability itself is driving these differences.
To better understand this, and address a significant gap in the literature, we also look at variation in disability. We break disability down into different types (physical, mental, communication and other) as well as whether the disability is more or less severe and continuously observed or not.
We find that those with more severe and those with continuous disabilities are less supportive of right-wing and more supportive of protest parties than those with less severe or more intermittent conditions, but there are few differences by disability type.
However, it is notable that the relationship between disability and party support is no longer evident once we look at changes in disability status within individuals using panel data methods, another major contribution of our research in going beyond the existing literature.
This suggests that the differences may be due to something underlying both party support and disability (which perhaps relates to the childhood socialisation environment), or alternatively attributable to lifelong disability which occurs before our respondents join the panel and therefore cannot be detected through this analysis.
Our findings are not just important for scholars but also for political parties in understanding the drivers of support. Given the large number of disabled people globally – 16% of the world’s population or 1.3 billion people – if disability influences party support, changes in the prevalence of disability and/or electoral participation by disabled people have the potential to influence election results.
Image credit: Peter Fleming via iStock.