Lib Dems (UK): What is their constituency?

[King of Kensington]

Is it fair to say "the Celtic fringe" + the liberal middle classes that are "too progressive to vote Tory and too "bourgeois to vote Labour"?  People to the left of much of the Labour electorate on social issues but to the right of Labour on economic issues?

And second, is Political Geography & Demographics supposed to only be for US politics?

[King of Kensington]

Clinton though was very much a model for "New Labour."

[King of Kensington]

New England Yankees strike me a constituency that would vote Lib Dem under a British party system. 

[King of Kensington]

This is a complicated question.  Their voting base, especially pre-Coalition, was really quite heterogeneous, and I'm sure some of it was just "plague on both your houses" voters who didn't like either Labour or the Tories for various reasons without being at all liberal in any sense of the word.  (This helps to explain why polls show a significant number of ex-Lib Dems now voting UKIP.)  Of course in their strongholds quite a lot of it was always tactical; their leaflets have always pushed squeeze messages (hence their reputation for dodgy bar charts, which is thoroughly deserved) more strongly than actual policies.

Based on my own experience (and having been one myself once) I think you would find that quite a lot of the urban middle class type of Lib Dem voters (pre-Coalition) wouldn't have  thought of themselves as right of Labour on economics.  (We're talking Blair-era Labour, of course.)  Their beef with Labour would have been on other matters (one of which is four letters long and ends in a Q).

Yes, New Labour's positioning led the Lib Dems to outflank Labour on the left, especially on the questions of civil liberties and the Iraq war.  Didn't Tariq Ali call for a Lib Dem vote?

I would think Lib Dems are less likely to defect to UKIP though than Labour or Tories - Labour because of their appeal in working class communities, and the Tories because UKIP offers a new home for reactionary voters that previously voted Tory.

[King of Kensington]

Interesting:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/03/ukip-have-taken-more-votes-lib-dems-most-think

Fewer Labour defectors than I thought.  Maybe ex-Labour voters that are now supporting UKIP defected after 1997.

[King of Kensington]

http://may2015.com/featured/ukippers-are-likely-to-have-voted-tory-in-2010-but-labour-in-the-1990s/

[King of Kensington]

Another (more cynical) way to view the LibDems is that to win seats as... varied... as Brent Central/Redcar and Westmorland & Lonsdale/Twickenham at the same time, your only real electoral strategy is one of shameless local level populism, supported by very well targeted tactical votes and protest voters.

The Liberal Party of Canada - after their disastrous 2011 showing  -  sort of looks like the Lib Dems at the moment in terms of their composition - though it was never a party for "protest votes."  They current hold low income immigrant heavy seats like Etobicoke North, university centers like Kingston and Guelph, urban elite seats like Toronto's St. Paul's and Montreal's Westmount as well as some holdouts in rural Atlantic Canada. 

[King of Kensington]

There was actually an argument in Canadian political science developed in the 60s (based on Hartz's fragments theories) which maintained that while Canada was also a predominantly "liberal" society, it also had a "Tory touch" (traditional collectivist noblesse-oblige conservatism) that made Canada more amenable to socialist ideas.

But I don't agree that the Liberals were 19th century liberals.  In the early 20th century they were "reform liberals" and sort of represented the left-wing of the bourgeoisie.  Labour sought to displace the Liberals because they were the main competitor on the center-left of the spectrum.  In the 1929 election, Keynes developed their economic program.  Tony Benn's father was a former Liberal MP. 

The Conservatives may have been more "noblesse oblige" in the 50s and 60s, but it was also the main party of the wealthy who were turning against the "grand compromise" of the postwar period.  While Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph certainly ran up against traditionalist elements, I think the Conservative Party made the most logical sense to transform along neoliberal lines, given that it was the main alternative to Labour and the party of choice of the country's elites.