How different are current Liberal Democrats and centrists?

After yesterday’s post — and thanks to everyone who’s shared and commented on it, the feedback has been really useful — it occurred to me that the one thing I’d not looked at in it was where people who currently identify as Liberal Democrats or vote for the party position themselves. So I went and crunched a few more numbers from the British Election Study to see.

(For this post, I stuck to data solely from Wave 14 of the current BES, all of whom were surveyed in May 2017, in the run up to last year’s election, so a few of the numbers are slightly, but not significantly, different from the ones I used yesterday)

There are three different questions we can use to identify people as Liberal Democrats in the BES. The first is to use the voting intention question — ‘if there was a general election tomorrow which way would you vote?’ — while the other two are questions about which party a voter identifies with. First voters are asked “Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat or what?” and then those who answer no or don’t know to asked get asked a second question: “Do you generally think of yourself as a little closer to one of the parties than the others? If yes, which party?”. So, we have three pools that are broadly similar but not identical — one of Liberal Democrat voters, one of people who think of themselves as Liberal Democrats, and one of people who think of themselves as closer to the Liberal Democrats than any other party.