¹ Pulzer, Peter G. J., Political Representation and Elections in Britain, 3rd edn. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), p. 102.Google Scholar Early studies which led to this conclusion include Milne, R. S. and McKenzie, H. C., Straight Fight (London: Hansard Society, 1954)Google Scholar and Benney, Mark, Grey, A. P. and Pear, R. H., How People Vote (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956).Google Scholar

² For some of these qualifications, see Rose, Richard, ‘Britain: Simple Abstractions and Complex Realities’, in Rose, Richard, ed., Electoral Behaviour: A Comparative Handbook (New York: Free Press, 1974), pp. 481–542Google Scholar and Rasmussen, Jorgen, ‘The Impact of Constituency Structural Characteristics Upon Political Preferences in Britain’, Comparative Politics, VI (1973), 123–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ For a fuller review of the historical literature, see Wald, Kenneth D., ‘Patterns of English Voter Alignment Since 1885’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Washington University, 1976).Google Scholar

⁴ The difficulties faced by the Liberals as class assumed a larger role on the political agenda are discussed generally by Ostrogorski, M., Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, trans. Clarke, F. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1964, reprint of 1902 edn.), pp. 153–7Google Scholar; and in electoral terms by McKibbin, Ross I., Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), esp. Chap. 3.Google Scholar

⁵ Trevelyan, G. M., History of England (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Anchor, 1953, reprint of 1926 edn.), Vol. III, pp. 255–6.Google Scholar

⁶ Blewett, Neal, ‘The Franchise in the United Kingdom, 1885–1918’, Past and Present, XXXII (1965), 27–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Matthews, H. C. G., McKibbin, R. I. and Kay, J. A., ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, XCI (1976), 723–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ The major empirical studies are Cornford, James, ‘The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, VII (1963), 35–66Google Scholar; Pelling, Henry, Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (London: Macmillan, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, Paul, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967)Google Scholar; and Blewett, Neal, The Peers, the Parties and the People (London: Macmillan, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar An early study, which emphasized the class-base of pre-war voting, is Krehbiel, Edward, ‘Geographic Influences in British Elections’, Geographical Review, 1 (1916), 419–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁰ ‘The World War has brought a wholesale transference of the working class vote from Liberalism to Labour.’ Trevelyan, Charles, From Liberalism to Labour (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921), p. 22.Google Scholar

¹¹ Lowell, A. Lawrence, The Government of England, rev. edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1920), Vol. I, pp. 125, 533–5.Google Scholar For a similar argument, see Hardie, J. Keir, Labour Leader, 28 11 1896Google Scholar, in Hughes, Emrys, ed., Keir Hardie's Speeches and Writings (Glasgow: ‘Forward’ Publishing Co., 1949), pp. 59–60Google Scholar

¹² Strachey, St Loe, ‘Infringing a Political Patent’, Nineteenth Century, XXXVII (1895), 206–14.Google Scholar

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¹⁵ The data were made available to Washington University by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, which bears no responsibility for the analysis presented here. The table corresponds to Table 6.6 in Butler and Stokes in the coding of all variables. It differs in that (1) female respondents have been purged and (2) the dependent variable measures the respondent's first remembered partisan preference. The dependent variable was created by using variable 490 in the Butler and Stokes data set. For more specific information, see Study of Political Change in Britain 1963–1970 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1972), Vol. I.Google Scholar

¹⁶ On London's religious life, see McCleod, Hugh, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974).Google Scholar Residential segregation was discussed by Masterman, C. F. G. in Heart of the Empire (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), pp. VI, 11.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The constituencies were grouped as predominantly working-class or middle-class according to the classification scheme in Blewett, , The Peers, the Parties and the People, Appendix A.Google Scholar

¹⁸ The index was first presented in Alford, Robert, Party and Society (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), Chap. 5Google Scholar, and was discussed further by Alford, Robert, ‘Class-Voting in the Anglo-American Political Systems’, in DiPalma, Giuseppi, ed., Mass Politics in Industrial Societies (Chicago: Markham, 1972), 166–99Google Scholar, and Korpi, Walter, ‘Some Problems in the Measurement of Class Voting’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXVIII (1972), 627–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A fuller description of the process of modifying it for areal analysis, along with an example of its use in analysing London election data, is presented in Wald, Kenneth D., ‘The Rise of Class-Based Voting in London’, Comparative Politics, IX (1977), 219–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The London figures in that article differ from the figures presented here because the constituencies were classified for the article according to the scheme devised by Paul Thompson; in the present analysis, we have used Blewett's classifications which include both London and the provinces.

¹⁹ For a particularly gloomy assessment, see Butler, David, ‘The Study of Political Behaviour in Britain’ in Ranney, Austin, ed., Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 211.Google Scholar Using considerable ingenuity, William Miller has managed to overcome many of these problems for the period after the war. See Miller, W. L., Raab, Gillian and Britto, R., ‘Voting Research and the Population Census, 1918–1971: Surrogate Data for Constituency Analysis’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, CXXXVII (1974), 384–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Miller's forthcoming book Electoral Dynamics.

²⁰ Bradford Observer, 26 10 1886, p. 4Google Scholar; Eastern Daily Press, 3 11 1889, p. 8.Google Scholar

²¹ Letter, Alfred A. Bird to Charles Marston, 10 October 1912. The letter, which is in the possession of Dr G. W. Jones, is partially reprinted in his Borough Politics (London: Macmillan, 1969).Google Scholar I am grateful to Dr Jones for making it available to me.

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²⁶ The method of classifying candidates in local elections is described in Wald, , ‘Patterns of English Voter Alignment’, pp. 323–5.Google Scholar

²⁷ For a detailed comparison of the five cities, see Wald, , ‘Patterns of English Voter Alignment’, pp. 18–56.Google Scholar

²⁸ Kammeyer, Kenneth C. W., An Introduction to Population (San Francisco: Chandler, 1971), pp. 80–1.Google Scholar See also the discussion in Cornford, , ‘The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century’, pp. 38–9.Google Scholar

²⁹ Innes, John W., Class Fertility Trends in England and Wales (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1938).Google Scholar For a more detailed discussion of the procedure, see Wald, , ‘Patterns of English Voter Alignment’, pp. 111–28Google Scholar and also ‘The Development of Social Indicators for Historical Election Research’ (paper presented to the European Studies Conference at the University of Nebraska – Omaha, 10, 1976).Google Scholar

³⁰ The use of 0·5 as a cut-off mark was arbitrary but reasonable. Since a particular variable might meet that figure in its relationship to four other measures but fall below it in one other case, the standard was sometimes relaxed.

³¹ Sussex Evening Times, 29 04 1890, p. 4, and 18 04 1890, p. 3Google Scholar; Brighton Gazette, 2 11 1907, p. 5.Google Scholar

³² Brighton Gazette, 28 09 1905, p. 5.Google Scholar

³³ Brighton Gazette, 19 10 1905, p. 4Google Scholar; 3 November 1906, p. 5; 5 October 1900, p. 5; 1 November 1902, p. 5; 26 October 1905, p. 5.

³⁴ For the classification scheme, see Wald, , ‘Patterns of English Voter Alignment’, pp. 323–5.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ In his Origins of the Labour Party, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, Henry Pelling attributed the quiescence of working-class voters between the second and third Reform Acts to ‘the prosperity of the country under laissez-faire conditions’ which had ‘eliminated the immediate risk of serious social discontent among the workers’ (p. 4). That surely implies that worker militancy would be strongest during periods of economic distress. Yet on the next page, Pelling writes that ‘In the later seventies, the activities of the labour movement were curtailed by the severe trade depression.’

⁴¹ Hutchison, Keith, Decline and Fall of British Capitalism (New York: William Morrow, 1950), pp. 25–31, 101–13.Google Scholar

⁴² Rose, Richard and Urwin, Derek, ‘Social Cohesion, Political Parties and Strains in Regimes’, Comparative Political Studies, II (1969), 3–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar