The case for a cost of living populism: on deliverism, emotionalism and everything in-between
Over the coming weeks, Renewal Online will be hosting a debate over the merits or demerits of 'cost of living' politics. First up, Steve Akehurst - Director of Persuasion UK - makes the case for a 'cost of living populism'.
In what circumstance do political parties win elections? In some ways it’s a question so broad and beguiling as to be impossible to contest cleanly, akin to asking why one football team triumphs over another. The answer is almost always some intractable combination of art and mathematics, judgement and sheer randomness.
All that said, there are some things we do know. One is that incumbent parties tend to become more unpopular over time as real-world problems, unfulfilled promises and scandals rack up against its reputation – a ‘cost of ruling’ penalty. It feels like this process has sped up in recent years and it is ever-present. It is usually channelled through what political scientists call valence factors: relatively unideological perceptions of competence or leadership and delivery.
Issues matter too, though. Whichever way you look at it our politics is the stuff of issues. Politicians use differences on them to communicate values and contrast themselves with their opponents in front of voters.
There are two basic axes on which issue competition happens. The first is ownership: what party is most trusted on a given topic? This is something that’s movable but also heavily influenced by parties’ historical brand and current popularity.
The second axis, often neglected but pivotal, is essentially attentional: how important, how top of mind – how salient – is an issue to voters in this current moment?
We can map over the top of all this the difference between deliverism – the real world material impacts of politics on voters’ day-to-day life – and emotionalism, the way political events trigger group identities and partisan loyalties (yes, vibes, if you insist).
The problem facing progressive parties
I raise all this because I think you can understand a lot of the travails of progressive political parties recently through this schema, certainly in western Europe and the Anglosphere.
Some of it is simply that many centre-left parties benefited from their opponents being in power during Covid and then themselves were left holding the parcel when the music stopped and record inflation hit.
But a great deal is attentional. It’s about issue salience. The handful of issues that divide modern social democratic electoral coalitions and unite radical right ones have been super-charged in visibility and importance these past five years. This is more or less any issue that sits on the cultural axis of British politics – having to do with social liberalism vs social conservatism – especially those that circle racial resentment, like asylum and immigration.
Crucially, these issues are not put at the forefront of news and culture by accident. Real world events play a role of course (boat crossings exist). But far more consequential is an entire right-leaning media and algorithmic information eco-system, increasingly radicalised post Musk’s capture of Twitter, that exists solely to keep those issues front of mind for voters and media elites especially, and to bully mass outlets like the BBC into covering them.
A recent example is the ‘invasion’ of the Spanish territory of Ceuta by Moroccan asylum seekers. There is now decent evidence that this was not that much more than a psy-op, at least in-part facilitated by the Moroccan government to destabilise the Sanchez government. And it worked. Amplified and exploited by old and new media alike, it led the news for days. This is attentional politics as war by other means.
Closer to home, the tragic murder of Henry Nowak was appropriated by parts of the British right to serve a similar function.
Those who work for or sympathise with modern parties of the radical right do this because they know it works. If you plot on one axis the percentage of people in any given poll citing asylum and immigration as a top 3 issue and on the other the Reform vote in the same poll, you will get a pretty serious correlation.
There are a few possible responses to this.
The classic one, best embodied by Keir Starmer’s former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, is to insist that these issues should not belong to the right. Governments of the left should compete with – even outflank – parties of the right on these matters, at the very least to neutralise the terrain. This theory undergirded not just large-scale policy reforms under Starmer but many set-piece moments of signalling like the ‘island of strangers’ speech or infamous jewellery-at-the-border story.
There is a sound enough logic to all this and advocates can point to the Danish social democrats as a case study of success, albeit that is not an uncontested case study.
The basic complication, though, is that as a strategy it tends to fail in far more cases than it succeeds. This fact is a strikingly robust finding in political science, an area not known for its consensus. Unless you do something so big and visible as to totally kill an issue or re-make your electoral coalition – as the Tories did with Brexit – all you achieve with a flurry of signalling or micro-announcements on such a topic is helping your opponents keep their best issue in the news.
Research by Persuasion usually backs this up. Over recent years we have RCT tested various ‘this government is getting tough’ style videos from Labour Home Secretaries and the only belief shifted in the outcome survey tends to be a further spike in the perceived importance of the issue – and a small rise in sympathy for Reform.
A pre-condition of success for modern progressive parties, then, is the lowering of salience of topics like asylum, migration and crime – at least if they want to continue to marry cross-class, cross-generational coalitions.
Some deliverism on asylum especially will obviously be an important aspect of this.
But larger is the obligation to try to shift the attentional terrain onto more advantageous issues, something admittedly easier in government than opposition. This is what underlines the theory of what I’d call a cost of living populism.
What is cost of living populism?
The loose idea here is to use noisy fights over affordability to raise the salience of values divides over the economy – or the traditional left-right axis - and try to crowd out those of culture.
Cost of living is already important to voters, so no heavy lifting there is necessary, but it is generally seen by most as a valence issue. One where no great difference is perceived between left and right and largely as an outgrowth of economic managerialism and competence.
To change this, things like water and electricity bills, private rents, or pay and conditions need to be understood as questions of whose side government is on, ordinary people or vested interests.
It is not just that modern social democratic electoral coalitions are more united – and in fact notably more populist – on these issues than ever before, but the modern right finds itself more divided on them than before, with splits both between parts of its voter base and its elite coalition.
Sticking a wrench in all this and activating it probably unavoidably requires some loud fights with those vested interests, either in how policies are designed or funded. This is not an end in itself – and does not need to look mad – but is a means of capturing attention and establishing contrast. Whether we like it or not (and there’s lots of reasons not to) conflict is the main engine of the modern attention economy and attention itself now the most precious zero-sum resource in public life.
Philosophically this is the opposite approach of the Starmer government. Oddly this government actually did numerous progressive economic things but sought to do them as quietly as possible, while simultaneously seeking to do a few socially conservative with as much of a din as it could muster.
The best exponent of the alternative strategy is, obviously, Zohran Mamdani in New York, having taken him from a rounding error in the polls to overcoming an opponent – Andrew Cuomo – widely seen as a shoe-in for the next Mayor.
Mamdani is now one of the most effective and popular politicians in the US, but affordability populism goes beyond him. It is more or less the new meta in Democratic politics, as even James Carville makes clear. Most of the insurgent Congressional candidates are running on it this year. Beyond the States, you see it in elements of how Pedro Sanchez has governed in Spain or Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.
On deliverism and emotionalism
There is a more substantive underpinning to cost of living populism, one which offers the tantalising prospect of marrying retail politics with a fresh macro-economic strategy and political economy.
The work of Alfie Stirling and others has argued powerfully that, contrary to the established story, living standards are not low because economic growth is low but growth is low because living standards are low. Through this lens, a demand-side boost to them would get business and the economy moving.
Meanwhile, CommonWealth and Mat Lawrence have argued that long term only public ownership of essentials can bring down costs for consumers.
All that said, given both the parlous state of Britain’s public finances and its machinery of government, it’s unlikely even the best government could plausibly transform living standards in the next few years. This leads some to argue that any bet on affordability populism is a poor one, since you are making a rod for your own back.
But this is to misunderstand it is a creed, I think. The political impact of any cost of living populism relies less on deliverism and more on the performance theatre of politics; the emotionalism. On getting caught trying. And on dominating the attentional sphere with arguments where public opinion is on your side and against your opponent.
To go back briefly to New York, rent freezes, free buses or publicly owned grocery stores have not and will not transform any New Yorker’s living standards, but the furore around them – aided by quite how furious it made his opponents – left Mamdani’s target voters in no doubt whose side he was.
We have seen some of this with the early days of Burnhamism. His first week was defined by a flurry of crowd-pleasing announcements of cost of living. Most of them were relatively modest in policy terms, but they were delivered slickly and they gave him definition in the eyes of voters seeing him for the first time.
And it worked reasonably well. At the time of writing, Burnham currently enjoys personal ratings not thought possible and a bounce for Labour in the polls. Polling shows that the most memorable measures have been his affordability ones.
Indeed, the most promising aspect of the new No 10 is that they understand the attentional terrain of British politics and seek to dominate it far more aggressively than their predecessors. Within this, only once or twice has he been drawn onto Farage’s turf and he usually doesn’t stay long.
Of course, things will get harder for the Prime Minister. He is in the honeymoon phase.
If we wanted to be pedantic, we can probably also call what he’s done more cost of living popularism – ‘80-90% support’ propositions that few can disagree with – rather than a politics of good guys and bad guys, the latter cutting slightly against Burnham’s zen socialism. This is entirely fair enough, although the PM will likely find that as the novelty wears off he has to find new or innovative ways of sustaining attention.
All said, though, it is a decent start and Burnham’s own experience with the Bee network in Manchester shows you he has an intuitive understanding of how to blend policy and modern communications effectively.
Conclusion
As a survival strategy for social democrats in this moment and in this century, cost of living populism is of course not incontestable. There’s many ways it might fail even on its own terms.
Alternative survival strategies exist, but I’d argue all have bigger weaknesses. Leaning more cleanly into social liberalism (eg through a Rejoin offer on Europe) is attention grabbing but requires a bigger re-think of electoral coalitions and is risky in our first past-the-post system.
The public realm and public services remain very important and tangible to voters, and will always be the bread and butter stuff of delivery. But they also tend to be more structural and harder to drive communications around.
Whatever the approach, in an age when the competing pulls on voters attention span have never been stronger, and their attachment to political parties never weaker, clear definition becomes even more essential. And for that, something is needed to glue it together. For all its challenges, cost of living populism remains progressives’ best bet.
Steve Akehurst is the Director of Persuasion UK