ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Elections and Representation
This article is part of the Research TopicWhat's Going On? European Electoral Change in Historical ContextView all 6 articles
The Rise of the Reform Party in Britain – Modelling Reform Voting in the 2024 General Election
Provisionally accepted
- University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
In the 2024 UK general election the radical right party, Reform, came third with a 14.3% share of the vote, capturing 5 seats in the House of Commons. This was a breakthrough election for the party, albeit with limited success in relation to the number of seats captured. This paper models the determinants of Reform party voting at the constituency level using Census data to analyse the sources of its support. It examines four distinct but related explanations of Reform voting. The four models can be labelled: anti-mainstream, relative deprivation, identity politics, and democratic dissatisfaction. The analysis shows that they all contribute to explaining Reform support, but dissatisfaction with democracy is marginally the most important
Keywords: multivariate modelling, Reform party, General Election 2024, Constituency analysis, census data
Received: 19 Apr 2025; Accepted: 28 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Whiteley. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Paul Whiteley, whiteley@essex.ac.uk
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.