At the 2026 Board Intelligence Governance Summit, pollster James Kanagasooriam discussed the surprising trends underlying political volatility, and how to spot what’s going to happen next.
Looking back, it’s remarkable how stable UK politics remained in the years after the financial crisis. The two-party system briefly wobbled when it gave way to a coalition government in 2010, but few predicted the rise of populism or the rapid decline in prime ministerial tenures from 2016 onwards.
One person who has tracked these trends closely is James Kanagasooriam, chief research officer at Focaldata: he was the pollster whose prescient analysis of Leave-leaning Labour voters produced the now famous term, ‘the Red Wall’, before the 2019 UK general election.
When he addressed Board Intelligence’s 2026 Governance Summit, Kanagasooriam’s message was sobering: things may seem marginally more stable than they were, but the underlying trend in UK politics is towards further volatility.
The silver lining for boards hoping to steer organisations over the coming years is that you can get better at seeing around corners — wherever your organisation is based, and whatever the nature of the political volatility you’re facing.
“Political coalitions are flat shares. It's who can you put up with for the longest in order to achieve a goal. The critical thing about Western politics is that groups of people are now unwilling to flat-share with other people, where they were 20 or 25 years ago. That's fundamentally what's changed,” Kanagasooriam told the Summit.
Political tribes are getting smaller, reflecting a wider cultural shift around identity. This may look like a social media phenomenon, but Kanagasooriam explained that it’s also happening in the places where people live.
James Kanagasooriam, Chief Research Officer at Focaldata, in conversation with Jennifer Sundberg, co-founder and Advisory Board member at Board Intelligence
In what he calls “the big sort” people increasingly live alongside others who share their social and political views. This changes what people see as acceptable and reduces their empathy for those who disagree, he said, deepening political division.
Kanagasooriam traced much of this sorting back to higher education. He described the decision to go to university as a “Sorting Hat for personality” that tends to cluster like-minded people in the same cities.
The sorting also makes elections more volatile. In the UK's Brexit referendum, some streets voted 80% Leave and others 90% Remain. When an area is that uniform, people tend to change their minds together. “People are willing to swing as a group,” Kanagasooriam said. “When they change their mind, everyone changes their mind, and then you have a huge, disproportionate swing.”
Under the UK's voting system, those group swings have an outsized effect. A shift in one type of area can flip many swing seats at once.
Kanagasooriam also linked rising populism to a change in what education delivers. A degree no longer reliably leads to a higher income, he said, and that gap is fuelling populism.
To explain this, he drew on two labels coined by the economist Thomas Piketty: the 'Brahmin Left' and the 'Merchant Right'. Piketty used them to describe how left-wing parties have come to attract the most highly educated voters, and right-wing parties the wealthiest. Kanagasooriam applied the labels to two groups he sees moving towards populism.
“The Merchant Right are people who have lots of money and not much post-high-school education. The Brahmin Left are those with lots of degrees, lots of debt, and no money,” he said. He added that possible job losses from AI would hit the Brahmin Left far harder than the Merchant Right.
Kanagasooriam’s own analysis reveals a feature both populist-leaning groups have in common: zero-sum thinking, the belief that your gain must be someone else’s loss. The more zero-sum thinking in a country, he said, the greater the level of political instability and distrust of institutions.
He also cited research from Harvard showing that people who grew up during periods of low economic growth are more likely to think in zero-sum terms.
This, Kanagasooriam said, means not only that zero-sum thinking is troublingly sticky, but also that economic growth is fundamental to long-term political stability. “I'm staggered by the avoidance of the question of economic growth because it is the fundamental driver behind all the volatility that you see.”
What can you do about it?
If zero-sum thinking, populism, and domestic political volatility are the result of trends decades in the making, even skilled political strategists and communicators will struggle to contain them. And no single election or leader is likely to reverse them quickly.
The best thing organisations can do is learn to spot such underlying, but not always visible, trends early enough to avoid nasty surprises. Kanagasooriam has been ahead of trends for years, so what’s his advice for boards looking to do the same?
“I don't read the news. I don't listen to the Today Programme [on BBC Radio 4]. I don’t consume secondary information, which has already been parsed and structured. By the time you’ve heard the podcast, it’s out of date. The real thing to do is primary work,” he explained.
For him, this means scouring academic papers and fresh datasets. For boards, Kanagasooriam recommended seeking out ‘superforecasters’ — people who are close to the primary sources and able to see trends that others don’t (he picked out author Ian Leslie as a cultural superforecaster). He also pointed to blogging and newsletter platforms like Substack.
“I’m often astonished to see CEOs who are not on Substack, but they are reading the FT and the Economist,” Kanagasooriam said. “On Substack, you're reading stuff from people who have bothered to craft a 10,000-word article on a 10-year megatrend that appears two years before it happens.”
Picking out fresh, challenging external perspectives for the board may help it to see around corners, and not just see what it wants to see. Only then can it help steer its organisation through increasingly turbulent times.
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