INSIGHTS - INTO POL IT ICAL IDENTIT Y

She also in the economy: measured polarisation in three ways: • private enterprise is the best way to solve • standard deviation – the amount of variation from Britain’s economic problems the mean value of polarisation • major public services and industries ought to • ideological distances – the sum of ideological be in state ownership distances between all the individuals in a county in a given y. [...] In this case, the statement about the role of the public sector in the economy in the survey was “The government should take measures to reduce differences in income levels” – and ESS also asked: “In politics people sometimes talk of ’left’ and ’right’. [...] The paradoxical cluster is the largest at the beginning of the 2010s, but becomes the least stable by the end of the decade. [...] People in the paradoxical and sceptical clusters tended to move towards the concerned cluster between the two waves of data, but the paradoxical cluster is still 40% of the population. [...] • money and finances • politics and social attitudes • transport and the environment 44 EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF POLICIES More than that, though, our data make it possible for The longitudinal nature of the data allows researchers to researchers to evaluate the impact of policies – to assess compare the before and after.