Left-wing voters in the UK are popular on dating apps

The secret to seduction? Being left-wing. This is what a recent study , published in April by political science researchers Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte and Alberto Lopez Ortega in the Journal of Politics (1), reveals. In the United Kingdom, the most successful users of dating apps are those close to the ideas of the Labour Party, the Greens, or even the Social Democrats. This is to the great dismay of singles who are more right-wing, voters for the Conservative Party or Reform UK , on ​​the far right of the British political spectrum.

For the two researchers, the result, which was based on the reactions of 2,000 singles to fake profiles (images and biographies) generated by AI, is not so surprising. Users who seek romantic and sexual encounters via apps such as Tinder , Hinge, Grindr , and Bumble are much younger than the rest of society. The phenomenon is not new: the younger an individual is, the more politically left-leaning they are. Thus, the mass of left-leaning people is simply greater than the mass of right-leaning people.

Added to this is the fact that singles prefer, if they choose, to meet someone on the same political wavelength as them. Despite the Republican arc – from the left to LR – desired by Macron during the last legislative elections: if there is a gap, it is better that it does not cross the left-right border. "Conservative voters are much happier to date a Reform UK voter than someone who voted for the Labour Party," Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte stated in an article in the Guardian published this Monday, May 19. Let us reassure ourselves, according to the professor at the University of Southampton, "it is not a question of falling in love with the extreme right, but rather of allowing Conservative voters to feel more comfortable by dating someone who is not from the opposing ideological camp."

However, this study, which drew on people aged 18 to 40 in the United Kingdom, but also in Spain, reveals a surprising point. In the United Kingdom, Reform UK voters " are more likely - four points more - to succeed in the dating market than Conservative supporters ," points out second Alberto López Ortega, a visiting researcher at Harvard, also in The Guardian . Even though they have more right-wing opinions than Conservatives. Meeting a far-right voter is therefore no longer "unacceptable," he comments, speaking of a form of "normalization."

This advantage remains to be measured, since, as the British article, which refers to data collected by the British telecommunications regulator in February, specifies, dating apps are losing their appeal. Each is seeing its user numbers decline, like Tinder, which, in May 2024, recorded 600,000 fewer accounts than a year earlier.