The following maps are created using MRP data taken from 10156 participants in three YouGov surveys (Spring 2021, Summer 2022, and Autumn 2022) in polls conducted by Ben Ansell and the WEALTHPOL team.
The question used across all three surveys was “On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 represents a tax system that concentrates on taxing people’s wealth (their property, savings, and inheritances) and 10 concentrates on taxing people’s income from work, what would be your preference?”. The average score was 5.26.
In these maps, we code answers between 0 and 4 as preferring to tax wealth and 5-10 as no preferring to tax wealth (i.e. indifference or preferring to tax income). The percentage of people in the survey who prefer to tax wealth is 35.8.%. To provide context, 39.7% of people prefer to tax income and 24.5% of people are indifferent. The average support for preferring to tax wealth at the constituency level is 35.2% and the median constituency has a support level of 34.2%.
Below the maps is an interactive table, which also provides an option to download the constituency level data as a .csv file.
Please cite this data as Ben W Ansell (2023) ‘Wealth Taxation MRP Maps - UK Constituencies’
The original data and maps on house building can be found at https://rpubs.com/benwansell/991668 and https://rpubs.com/benwansell/991092 and is discussed at https://benansell.substack.com/p/the-uks-political-housing-crisis. The data for housing comes from 6700+ participants in Spring 2021 and Autumn 2022. Participants were asked “Thinking about new housing in your local area. How much would you support or oppose more homes being built in your local area?” A five point scale from strongly oppose to strongly support was constructed. These graphs show agreement with ‘support’ or ‘strongly support’ and present MRP estimates at the constituency level from a model including individual and local measures of education, gender, age, homeownership, and subjective class, as well as local measures of electoral support and census demographics.
The first graph has hexes for each constituency, sized relative to their support for preferring to tax wealth. The constituencies are coloured by which party won in the General Election of 2019 (sorry, by-election winners!). If you hover over you can see the percentage of the constituents in each constituency who are estimated to prefer taxing wealth.
This second map has hexes the same size but now coloured by the relative support for taxing wealth.
This map examines support for taxing wealth MINUS support for building houses. So larger hexes reflect constituencies where people prefer (in relative terms) to tax wealth than build houses and smaller hexes represent constituencies where people prefer to build houses than tax wealth.
This final map has equal sized hexes colored such that darker colours reflect constituencies where people on average prefer taxing wealth to building houses and lighter colours the reverse.
You can use the text boxes to search for your MP or constituency. By clicking the header of each column you can also rank order the data by that column. And if you want to download the data there’s a button below to do so.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement number 724949. The ERC project code for this project is WEALTHPOL.