The Professor Will See You Now: Having A Pint
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: having a pint
There is a scene in Season 3 of The Crown where Harold Wilson explains to the Queen the differences between his public and private personas. “I don’t like beer,” the prime minister says. “I prefer brandy.” He explains he favours wild salmon over tinned salmon, Chateaubriand to steak-and-kidney pie. “And I don’t like pipe-smoking. I far prefer cigars. But cigars are a symbol of capitalist privilege. So, I smoke a pipe on the campaign trail and on television. Makes me more approachable. Likeable.”
The scene is, as far as we know, entirely fictitious – and the reality was more complicated than this makes out. Marcia Williams is on record, for example, saying that Wilson’s preference for tinned salmon was in fact genuine, rather than an affectation, but many other differences between the private and public Wilson are true enough and well-known. Some new research, just published in the British Journal of Political Science, shows that he was on to something.
The study tested voters’ reactions to hypothetical politicians with a variety of different characteristics. Can politicians use “cultural consumption” to signal their attachment to class identity? Turns out they can. How a politician spent their spare time mattered – and in a non-trivial way. The difference between the appeal of candidates based on what they drank was greater than the effect of holding a left- or right-wing approach to economic policy.
The research tested three ways politicians could kick back: having a beer in a pub, drinking wine while listening to classical music, or enjoying meeting friends. Voters looked askance at the wine-drinker – although we don’t know whether it was the wine or the classical music that was the downer (or both). By contrast, being someone who liked meeting up with your mates was seen as a plus.
Overall, there was no advantage or disadvantage in being a beer-drinker. But one of the key findings in the paper is that these effects are heterogeneous – they affect different types of voters in different ways. Green voters, for example, do not have a problem with the solitary wine-drinker. And radical right voters with no tertiary education were significantly more positive about the beer-drinker. Indeed, buried away in the supplementary information is what seems to me to be one of the key findings of the research: drinking beer made the actual class origins of the candidates largely irrelevant to radical right voters, in a way it did not for supporters of other parties.
The study was of Swiss voters, but one senses the lesson might travel. Do we in Britain, for example, have any politicians – themselves not from especially humble backgrounds – who are known to like a pint and who are popular with working-class voters on the right?
The potential research agenda here is huge. These three attributes just scratch the surface. Imagine all the other things we could test. Sports? (I assume there is a reason so many politicians talk about football, rather than, say, dressage.) Cuisine? (Andy Burnham surely knew what he was doing when in 2015 he answered a question about his favourite biscuit by saying that he wasn’t a biscuit kind of a guy – “give me a beer and chips and gravy any day”.) What about other hobbies? Gardening? Knitting? Warhammer?
If the gods are against you, no amount of beer drinking is going to save you
The potential impact of the research might also be significant, if not necessarily positive. For the very first time since I started writing this column – and this piece brings up my half century of articles – I wondered if it might be best for everyone concerned if we didn’t bring the study to people’s attention. The number of pub-based photo ops this might engender at the next election is too horrifying to contemplate.
Voters do have to believe you, though; you must look like you have seen the inside of a pub before. And as often noted in this column, the electoral effects are small. If the gods are against you, no amount of beer drinking is going to save you. But who’s going to take that chance? Bottoms up!
Further reading: D Weisstanner and S Engler, The Electoral Appeal of Symbolic Class Signalling Through Cultural Consumption, British Journal of Political Science (2025)
