Briefing paper

Understanding the Welsh electorate

Mapping voter types ahead of the 2026 Senedd Election

New research defines six Welsh voter types ahead of the Senedd election

Queue of people waiting to enter a polling station

Authors:
Sam Beardsworth Lovisa Moller Vallgarda
Saskia Redgate
Publishing date:

31 March 2026

Welsh politics has its own distinct fault lines. Views differ on devolution, on the Welsh language, on the role of Cardiff Bay. Understanding how Welsh voters think requires more than applying a national lens to a devolved context. Working with the BBC, we mapped the values and attitudes that shape the Welsh electorate today and grouped voters into six types that capture the real diversity of views across Wales ahead of the Senedd Election on 7 May 2026. This mapping is used to inform a BBC Wales journalism project looking into how the Senedd election campaign develops online, and what types of content voters might be seeing.

Six types of Welsh voter

The current Welsh electorate is made up of six distinct groups of voters. Group affiliation is defined by views on 16 key questions. The groups have shared characteristics, such as social class, gender, levels of education, and geographical location, as well as aligned views on Welsh identity, interest in politics, and trust in MPs and the government.

The Established (10% of the electorate)	Typically older, wealthier and living in rural Wales, this group is sceptical of welfare spending and state intervention, and places a high value on social order and authority. They are strongly opposed to the 20mph speed limit. A large proportion were born in England.
The Civic-minded (17%)	Higher-income and politically engaged, this group cares deeply about wealth distribution and inequality. They are particularly focused on public services, with the cost of living, health and social care among their top concerns.
Traditionalists (30%)	The largest group in the Welsh electorate, Traditionalists are economically left-leaning but hold more conservative social values, and are among the most likely to identify as Welsh.
Floating Centrists (15%)	Centrist on most political issues and the least politically engaged of the six groups, Floating Centrists are more likely to be younger women living in urban areas. The cost of living is their most pressing concern.
Principled Self-Starters (14%)	Most likely to be in employment, and often self-employed, this group believes strongly in hard work and self-reliance. They are sceptical of welfare dependency despite sharing concerns about wealth inequality. They hold strong views on most issues but tend towards low party alignment.
New Progressives (11%)	The youngest and most left-leaning group, New Progressives are socially liberal, pro-welfare and politically engaged. They are the only group that strongly supports the 20mph speed limit, and a majority back Welsh independence.

These six types offer a robust way of understanding the main patterns in how people in Wales think about politics. People’s views span a wide spectrum, so no individual will match any one type exactly. However, each profile reliably reflects a cluster of broadly similar outlooks and captures what is typical of that group rather than a precise description of every person within it.

How we identified voter profiles

To identify these six voter types, we analysed responses to 16 attitudinal questions from NatCen's British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, answered by Welsh participants. These questions draw on BSA's well-established scales measuring left–right values, libertarian–authoritarian outlook, and attitudes towards welfare. These attitudinal dimensions, developed and validated by NatCen, have provided a reliable way of understanding political values over many decades. We pooled responses across three years of the survey (2023–2025) to give us a rich and detailed sample of Welsh respondents to work with.

As with our 2024 Dividing Lines typology, which identified diving lines ahead of the 2024 UK General Election, we used a technique called k-medoids clustering to group respondents whose attitudes were most similar to one another. This statistical method works through multidimensional data to identify distinct groupings: in this case, six types of Welsh voter. We then examined the demographic make-up of each group, looking at factors such as age and income, as well as spread across Wales, to build a fuller picture of traits that are more common for each opinion type.

To ensure the analysis captured views specific to Wales and the Senedd Election, we also drew on an additional survey commissioned by the BBC and delivered by Savanta, which included questions more directly relevant to Welsh politics. Bringing together two surveys is methodologically complex, so we matched respondents across both datasets using questions that appeared in each. We then estimated how likely each person in the second survey was to belong to one of the six voter types identified from the BSA analysis. Those whose answers most closely matched a given type were given more weight in the findings, allowing us to integrate the richness of both datasets while keeping the six voter types at the heart of the analysis.